Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ghana

Portal:Ghana

Portal:Ghana (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Improperly maintained portal that violates WP:POG.

• The semi-active WikiProject Ghana only lists thirteen articles in the upper quality tiers (FA, GA, FL, etc).
• Improperly maintained by the creator, and the only other legitimate maintainer was indefinitely blocked on New Years' 2013. Among the many African nation portals fervently maintained by NA1k, and just like the other similarly-nominated portals, NA1k's changes are merely aesthetic.
• Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 21 for the portal versus 5035 for the parent article, or .4171%. ToThAc (talk) 13:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a paint job by a serial portal one-off updater. The one biography sub-page was last updated in 2010, and it's world renowned subject died in August 2018, which speaks to the sloppiness of NA1K's update. Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Natsubee, who (being very generous) abandoned it in Oct. 2009 and has made one edit to this portal and portal space since. The portal clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had a decade of no steady maintainers and it had a very low 21 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (despite the head article Ghana having 5,038 views per day in the same period).

POG also states portals should be associated with a wikiproject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject Ghana is best described as inactive (the last editor to editor conversation was in Oct. 2016), and the portal's only ever mention on the talk page was an August 2019 post by an outside editor stating the portal was abandoned and asked if anyone was interested in maintaining it, which got no response. The portal isn't mentioned on the main page by name, either. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Ghana is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

• When the portal was updated with transclusions, I added the entry for Kofi Atta Annan directly to the main portal page (diff), which via transclusion, posts the most up-to-date content relative to the subject's page. In the process, I commented-out the selected biography section (diff). The previously outdated content from the single entry at Portal:Ghana/Selected biography was not included on the page after the portal was improved. Not sure why the user above seems to think it was, but after I finished updating, it was not. This improved the portal, providing WP:READERS with up-to-date information, rather than denigrating it. This is certainly not sloppy; rather, it is precise. I went ahead and updated the subpage as well (diff), despite it not being used in the portal at this time. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:38, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

The bio was not a redirect and was still part of the portal, so it should have been updated or removed when you did your update, so as not to mislead readers who looked at the sub-pages. Your "update" was shoddy work, which is why I pointed it out for what it was. Also, the fact that you have had to edit the same brief comment seven times already after posting just adds to the serious WP:CIR concerns that @BrownHairedGirl has raised about you. Newshunter12 (talk) 10:01, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

• Weak Delete - The recent work by User:Northamerica1000 is not just a paint job. The content-forked subpage structure has been upgraded to transclusion, which reduces but does not eliminate the need for maintenance, and there is no designated maintainer. The repair by NA1k amounts to putting a new transmission in a car with a failing engine, not purely aesthetic. The portal still has only 21 average daily pageviews. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:51, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. The nominator @ToThAc has misunderstood the effects of @NA1K's edit, which are perhaps more easily understood if they are viewed as one big diff[1]. What NA1K actually did was to bypass the content-forked sub-pages, and instead use {{Transclude random excerpt}} to embed a list of 36 articles.

The edit history obscures this, because two of NA1K's long-documented anti-social editing habits are displayed here: their tendency to take ten or twenty edits to do what other editors would do in a single save, and their failure to use helpful edit summaries (e.g. including in the edit summary a link to the article being added).

Here is a list of the 36 articles, prefixed with the quality assessment applied to them by WikiProject Ghana:

1. B — Kofi Annan
2. start — Anglo-Ashanti wars
3. start — Women in Ghana
4. start — Ghana Cocoa Board
5. start — Kotoka International Airport
6. stub — Dutch Gold Coast
7. start — Ho, Ghana
8. B — Ghana national football team
9. C — Akan people
10. C — Ghanaian cuisine
11. GA — Harrison Afful
12. start — Ghana national cricket team
13. C — Accra
14. C — Kumasi
15. start — Sekondi-Takoradi
16. C — War of the Golden Stool
17. start — Wa, Ghana
18. start — Mining industry of Ghana
19. start — Ghana Premier League
20. stub — LGBT rights in Ghana
21. C — Tema
22. start — 1948 Accra riots
23. B — University of Ghana
24. start — Teshie
25. start — Ghana Empire
26. B — Water supply and sanitation in Ghana
27. start — Languages of Ghana
28. C — Elmina Castle
29. C — New Patriotic Party
30. B — Kwame Nkrumah
31. B — Ashanti Empire
32. C — Peter Turkson
33. start — Cape Coast
34. start — Lake Bosumtwi
35. start — Abedi Pele
36. start — Kakum National Park

Note that in many cases, the assessments are way out-of-date. For example, many of the articles rated start-class are actually at C-class standard. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

• Delete. Despite the errors in the nomination, @ToThAc is right about other points.

The list of the portal's current selected articles, which I posted above, illustrates the folly of trying to rebuild the portal. There simply are not not enough high-quality articles available, so NA1K chose a "never mind the quality, feel the width" approach. Yes, many of the articles are better than their current assessment rating indicates, but that failure of assessment simply another way in which how any portal on his topic is hobbled by limitations of the barely active WP:WikiProject Ghana.

Category:WikiProject Ghana articles shows that there are 5500 articles in the project scope, but few of them are high quality, as the table shows:

FA	A	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???	Total
0	0	13	111	483	2,526	4,611	0	227	3,163	5	42	26	0	41	232	214	8	528	12,230

Additionally, the years of neglect of the portal were followed by a one-off update of dubious quality. NA1K initially added themself as a "maintainer", but this was one of no less than 42 portals of which they claimed to be a maintainer: (Afghanistan, Belarus, Belize, Biochemistry, Coffee, Colorado, Companies, Costa Rica, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Evolutionary biology, Food, Free and open-source software, The Gambia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Housing, Hungary, Islands, Italy, Kuwait, Liquor, Lithuania, Moldova, Money, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Oman, Ontario, Panama, Physics, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia, Supermarkets, Tanks, Vietnam) They subsequently wisely removed themself as "maintainer" of all 42 after this was challenged as implausible.

So we are still left with a portal without a maintainer, and without an active WikiProject which might help recruit some maintainers.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This fails on at least three of the four counts:

1. ? Borderline no. As the table above shows, there is not enough high-quality content to build a balanced portal of high quality. When the numbers are this tight, it is not possible to build a portal which combines the three needed attributes: A/ number of articles, B/ balance of topics, and C/ quality of articles. At least one of the there attributes has to be sacrificed, and the post-NA1K portal sacrifices quality.
2. N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 21 views per day is low.
3. N Lots of maintainers. No. Not even one. In the last ten years, its creator User:Natsubee has made only one edit to the portal, and NA1K has withdrawn their claim to maintain it.
4. N WikiProject involvement. No. WP:WikiProject Ghana is generously tagged as "semi-active", but "in-active." would probably be more accurate. And as @Newshunter12 helpfully notes, it has never shown any interest in the portal.

This portal is yet another relic of a rush of portalmania in the late 2000s, when editor numbers were at their peak, and were often assumed (wrongly) to be ever-growing. But for the last decade, with fewer editors, there has been no interest in maintaining a portal on this topic, and almost no interest in reading it. Time to just delete it. And since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:38, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

• Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Africa), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:58, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
• Keep there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable. WP:POG says the portal must have "enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section". The table above lists 246 articles of C-class and above, which is far more than you need for the featured content section. The GAs and FA alone would provide about half the material. Countries which aren't tiny do constitute broad topics (Ghana has a population of about 30 million, which makes it more populous than, say, Australia). Sure, it hasn't got many page views, but that is a fundamental flaw of the portal system in general and consensus is against getting rid of portals entirely. I don't really understand the logic behind the maintainer arguments, whether the creator has maintained it is irrelevant (if that wasn't the case then even highly active portals could be deleted) and the fact that somebody has been making substantial changes to it recently suggests that it is not abandoned. Hut 8.5 18:12, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

  @Hut 8.5: "there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable" – Yes there is. ToThAc (talk) 19:16, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

  Nope, your link doesn't say that at all. Please read it in full, it allows an article "which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively". A typical B class article will certainly deal with the subject substantially. Later criteria make it even more clear that it's not expecting GA class and above, because it insists that the article shouldn't be marked as a stub and shouldn't have any cleanup tags. No article would ever get anywhere near GA with either. Hut 8.5 21:01, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

@Hut 8.5 This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a little paint job by a serial one-off updater with a history of shoddy work, and who likes portals in general so they try to throw wrenches into random or anticipated MfD's when they can. WP:POG requires portals have large numbers of readers and maintainers, and this has neither. There is also no community consensus to keep junk portals, nor has their ever been one. You are misstating the outcome of the crude RfC in 2018 that asked about eliminating all portals in one go, which was rejected. Subjective broadness about population means nothing here, only this portal's failing of WP:POG. Newshunter12 (talk) 09:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)