Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 September 10: Difference between revisions

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10 September 2019

Portal:Nanotechnology

This portal was deleted with only two !votes based on the mistaken assertion that the portal had been abandoned since 2012 and had no maintainer. No notification was given to me, the maintainer; apparently, a notification was misdirected to the portal's original creator, who has not been active since 2007, rather than myself.

Given that the basis for the deletion was factually incorrect, this falls under WP:DRVPURPOSE item 3: "significant new information has come to light since a deletion that would justify recreating the deleted page". In addition, given that the discussion received very few !votes, it possibly should have been closed as WP:NOQUORUM, which may also place it under item 1: "someone believes the closer of a deletion discussion interpreted the consensus incorrectly".

Upon undeletion I will promptly fix the issues with outdated information raised in the deletion discussion, which are easily fixed. This request includes Portal:Nanotechnology and its subpages, and Template:Nanotech selected and its tracking categories. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:03, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:04, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Mark Schierbecker: also pinging original deletion nominator. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:28, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Overturn and undelete as lister. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:28, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- To elaborate on my last point, the deletion discussion does fall under the letter of WP:NOQUORUM, "a nomination has received few or no comments from any editor with no one opposing deletion", in which case "the closing administrator should treat the XfD nomination as an expired PROD... [and] the article can be restored for any reason on request" (emphasis in original). Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 17:31, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist for additional discussion including the portal's declared maintainer. There was a {{Portal maintenance status}} template on the portal page identifying Antony-22 as the maintainer, so it was an oversight by the MfD nominator not to notify him. I don't think the closing admin did anything wrong here, but the earlier mistake justifies reopening the discussion so Antony-22 can defend his maintenance activities against the criticisms offered in the MfD discussion. Whether it makes any difference to the final result will depend on how that additional discussion goes. --RL0919 (talk) 21:43, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Agree, failure to notify an active listed maintainer is a critical failure for consensus decision making. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:18, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - @SmokeyJoe. See my !vote below. A22 was indeed a listed maintainer, but describing him as an active maintainer is quite a stretch. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:41, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - Failure to notify an inactive listed maintainer is a lesser-than-critical issue. Still, all stakeholders should be notified, and watchlisting is not always sufficient. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:46, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - @SmokeyJoe, it seems to meet that you expressing a personal preference rather than a policy or guideline. WP:MFD#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion says little about notifications, and WP:AFD#After_nominating:_Notify_interested_projects_and_editors is explicit that no notifications are required other than tagging the nominated page: "While it is sufficient to list an article for discussion at AfD (see above), nominators and others sometimes want to attract more attention from and participation by informed editors".
        So I see no policy basis for treating the lack of notification to a maintainer as being in any way deficient, let alone critical. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:06, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        True. We could add it to the rules, to notify maintainers of Portals, like how there are special rules when nomination WikiProject subpages, but it is possible that by the time we agreed to do that, and resolved the possibility of automating it, there will be no more portals anyway. In the meantime, for an very low participation XfD, we usually agree to relist to let a late person have their say. I think the closer should have been asked, and them immediately agreed. It’s very silly to have a megabyte review over a 3 person discussion. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:12, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        We usually agree to relist to let a late person have their say only when they have some statement of fact to contribute that was overlooked - typically, sources that weren't considered, or changes outside of Wikipedia since deletion. I can't recall DRV ever overturning on something so flimsy as "I used to edit this page, and I didn't get a chance to vote", which is what this amounts to. Antony-22: if you've got something to say that would reasonably have changed the outcome at MFD, now's the time to say it. The threshold's pretty low, but I don't see that you've passed it. —Cryptic 04:31, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        We do for sure usually relist if someone comes in just a bit late with something important to say. Antony-22 has not yet said what it is that he might say that is important, but sometimes we like to be nice to people. I see that he did ask User:MER-C at User_talk:MER-C#Portal:Nanotechnology. I am not fully onboard with the quorum talk, but I would have done a quick relist, it would have wasted less electrons than this DRV. Strongly agree with "The threshold's pretty low, but I don't see that you've passed it." --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:14, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        I've put more detail in a comment below. But basically my point is that all the content issues raised are ones that could have been fixed very easily by asking nicely. The deletion itself was based on the incorrect statement that the portal had been abandoned since 2012, and that no one was around to take the ten minutes to add a few death dates and update a few employers. Also, the discussion really does fall under the letter of WP:NOQUORUM. I realize that the expectations for portals have been changing over the last year or so, and I can certainly commit myself to bringing on more maintainers and associating with one or multiple WikiProjects. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 16:41, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Overturn and relist, portal has a named maintainer who has related deleted edits from 2016. (Also seems issues could be fixed relatively easily). —Kusma (t·c) 21:53, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse, as a typical SNOW deletion, but not objection to a relist for more participation. The challenge for User:Antony-22 will be to persuade others why this Portal could help readers better than the article Nanotechnology, and address the many standard portal criticisms including: Never used, no sources, core content compliance problems, redundant to and negatively competing with the parent article. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:16, 10 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Overturn and relist A fuller participation in the deletion discussion would be welcome. Also the oversight to notify the maintainer (prominently listed via the {{Portal maintenance status}} template) is most unfortunate. Perhaps the nominator was having too much "fun" in hastily churning out nominations, whilst engaging in their new hobby, to be bothered? --Cactus.man ✍ 00:26, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Overturn This is a case where a failure to notify has led to an unfortunate outcome. If the maintainer had !voted, this would have been at worst a no consensus. SportingFlyer T·C 02:00, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse. The statements made in the MFD clearly showed that the portal had not been (sufficiently) maintained for years. The small number of !voters in an XfD isn't a good reason to overturn an outcome - especially as many editors (including myself) don't bother commenting in cases where the nom has made a good case and no-one has disagreed. DexDor^(talk) 11:46, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist. Minimal participation and the maintainer wasn't even notified doesn't make for a valid discussion. Restore the portal and reopen the existing discussion for a week. I'm not optimistic the result will be any different, but at least let the maintainer have his say. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:24, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse deletion per DexDor. Notification is optional (if the portal is not on editor's watchlist, how can we expect a talkpage notification to be seen?), and the consensus was clear. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:11, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist as having a named maintainer might change the discussion and it wasn't that well attended to start with. I can't really fault the close though and the rationale for deletion wasn't just based on having no named maintainer, it also noted that large portions of the portal were very out of date. It might be worth restoring to draft space instead if it does have that many factual inaccuracies. Hut 8.5 18:16, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist The close was proper as DexDor explains. However, there is no harm to the project if the portal is relisted for more participation WP:IAR. --Enos733 (talk) 19:55, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist I do not recall any significant edits by Antony-22. I am fine with relisting. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 21:59, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- After a portal is first set up, subsequent updates to content are made on the subpages, not the main portal page. It's possible you only looked at the main portal page and saw the edits made by the original creator, but weren't looking in the right place to see the more recent content updates by me. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 23:33, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse as one of the Delete !voters. The close was proper. It is not true that the MFD would have been No Consensus if the maintainer had been notified. There were three Delete !votes including the nominator and myself, and no Keep !votes, so that one Keep vote would have still be a Delete consensus, unless a strong policy argument was provided for Keep. I will note that the maintainer could have checked the portal within the week of the listing, or watchlisted the portal, which makes them appear to be a low-priority maintainer. I wouldn't have changed my !vote if I knew that the portal had a semi-active maintainer, because I was persuaded by the errors (which illustrate that content-forked subpages have a tendency to content rot). However, a Relist is a reasonable idea, especially based on Ignore All Rules. Robert McClenon (talk)
- The portal was on my watchlist, but I suppose I missed it because I wasn't editing much that particular week and wasn't thoroughly perusing my watchlist, as happens sometimes when real life takes one's attention. A talk page notice would have generated an email, which I would have noticed and responded to very quickly. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 23:27, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse The MFD nominator was incorrect about the date of abandonment, but not about the fact of abandonment. Antony-22's deleted contribs shows that their last 3 edits to he portal were made on 1/ 29 March 2019, 2/ 23 June 2018, 3/ 12 July 2016. One tweak per year is not active maintenance, and the sheer number of factual errors adds to lack of credibility of A22's claim to be a maintainer. So this is not "significant new information", just a footnote.

Note that WP:POG has several other criteria which were clearly not met, such as the need for multiple maintainers and lots of readers and for an associated WikiProject.

So the error makes no material difference to the portal's status, and should not alter the outcome of the MFD. This woefully neglected portal has wasted the time of readers for years, and factually misled many of them. The fact that A-22 now seeks to assert himself as the architect of that neglect, after his culpability was mistakenly overlooked, does not justify wasting more of the community's time on the unpleasant exercise of demolishing A-22's claims. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:48, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse per BrownHairedGirl. I was one of the delete voters at the MfD and my vote would not have changed based on knowing that an editor, who for all intents and purposes long ago forsook this portal, had a bout of MfD induced nostalgia and wanted it kept. The portal was riddled with serious errors for years, which demonstrates Antony-22 was not a serious maintainer of this portal and even if they had been, did not require notification. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:31, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Failure to notify an individual isn't usually reversed by deletion review; we'll overturn if a page itself isn't tagged for deletion, and for images and templates sometimes if the tagging's not visible in article or article talkspace, but "I edit this page and didn't get a user talk notification" isn't the sort of significant new post-deletion information that WP:DRVPURPOSE is talking about.
I'll extend some benefit of the doubt since this was a minimally-attended deletion discussion, and I don't get the overall impression that individual portals get well-scrutinized at MFD. On the other hand, I can't find any nontrivial maintenance to the portal's content by the nom here since his updates to subpages of Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography on 7 November 2015, unless you count adding "Welcome to the nanotechnology portal", changing links to reflect the split of Nano/Bio Interface Center out of University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, or merely swapping which bio is on which subpage. (I don't.) So while I'll grant that the statement "no maintenance in six years" was incorrect, there's no reason to think that the correct "no meaningful maintenance in four years" would have changed the outcome, especially given the other issues raised at the MFD. Endorse. —Cryptic 04:11, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relist A poorly attended discussion that had some factual errors and a notification issue that might have turned the tide. Seems like it's worth a relist. Hobit (talk) 06:03, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As the closing admin, I defer to the outcome of this discussion. MER-C 13:43, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Several people have referred to "serious errors", but the issues pointed out were a couple of missing death dates and a couple of employers that needed to be updated. This would have been barely ten minutes of work if someone had just asked nicely, and certainly isn't reason to delete. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 16:17, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Antony-22: This tends to be mostly an issue with BLPs. I am not a huge fan of {{Transclude lead excerpt}}, but I recently decided to use it for pages as this one to avoid embarrassment related to long outdated info on BLPs (especially, to catch any deaths). —Kusma (t·c) 16:27, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) (Comment continued) I believe the last time I updated the content selections was in late 2016, so it's perhaps a valid criticism that that's a bit of a longer time than is ideal. For what it's worth, I had prepared updates to the selected biographies (mostly based on a few recent nanotechnology-related Nobel prizes), but hadn't gotten to implementing them yet. So again, this could have been fixed by nicely asking instead of jumping immediately to a deletion discussion.

Also, nanotechnology is a fairly broad subject, as it overlaps physics, chemistry, and even molecular biology, and any or all of those WikiProjects could adopt this portal. This would take a bit longer than the time allotted for a deletion discussion, but I can certainly commit myself to bringing on additional maintainers if this deletion review succeeds. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 16:17, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Members of topic wikiprojects generally take very little interest in portals. Nanotechnology may overlap those topics (and others), but it's smaller than any of those 3 topics. DexDor^(talk) 21:11, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, these are all topics better discussed at a relist. SportingFlyer T·C 21:36, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 Add a new entry BELOW THIS LINE copying the format: {{subst:drv2|page=<PAGE NAME>|xfd_page=<XFD PAGE NAME>|reason=<REASON>}} ~~~~      -->
-==== [[:Portal:Nanotechnology]] (closed) ====
+====[[:Portal:Nanotechnology]]====
-{| class="navbox collapsible collapsed" style="text-align: left; border: 0px; margin-top: 0.2em;"
-|-
-! style="background-color: #f2dfce; font-weight:normal; text-align:left;" |
-* <span id="Portal:Nanotechnology"></span>'''[[:Portal:Nanotechnology]]''' – '''No consensus; deletion endorsed by default.''' Opinions are divided between endorse and relist, with a slight majority for the latter course of action. But there's no consensus about what to do. In such cases, the contested decision is normally maintained by default, but the closing admin can at their discretion relist the discussion. I decline to do so here, because relisting is, in this case, not a compromise between "keep deleted" and "overturn to keep", but one of the options discussed in the DRV that did not obtain consensus. Moreover, the argument that relisting is appropriate because the "maintainer" was not notified strikes me as particularly weak in the light of [[WP:OWN]]. (Besides, how well is the "maintainer" doing their job if they didn't watchlist the portal page and didn't notice the deletion request?) <small><span style="border:1px solid black;padding:1px;">[[User:Sandstein|<span style="color:white;background:blue;font-family:sans-serif;">''' Sandstein '''</span>]]</span></small> 12:06, 18 September 2019 (UTC) <!--*-->
-|-
-| style="text-align:center;" | ''The following is an archived debate of the [[Wikipedia:Deletion review|deletion review]] of the page above. <span style="color:red;">'''Please do not modify it.'''</span>''
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-| style="border: solid 1px silver; padding: 8px; background-color: white;" |
 :{{DRV links|Portal:Nanotechnology|xfd_page=Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:Nanotechnology|article=}}
 This portal was deleted with only two !votes based on the mistaken assertion that the portal had been abandoned since 2012 and had no maintainer.  No notification was given to me, the maintainer; apparently, a notification was misdirected to [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Rama%27s_Arrow&diff=913476827&oldid=901977065 the portal's original creator], who has not been active since 2007, rather than myself.
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 ::Members of topic wikiprojects generally take very little interest in portals. Nanotechnology may overlap those topics (and others), but it's smaller than any of those 3 topics. <b>[[User:DexDor|DexDor]]</b><sup> [[User talk:DexDor|(talk)]]</sup> 21:11, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
 :::To be fair, these are all topics better discussed at a relist. [[User:SportingFlyer|SportingFlyer]] ''<span style="font-size:small; vertical-align:top;">[[User talk:SportingFlyer|T]]</span>''·''<span style="font-size:small; vertical-align:bottom;">[[Special:Contributions/SportingFlyer|C]]</span>'' 21:36, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
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-| style="text-align:center;" | ''The above is an archive of the [[Wikipedia:Deletion review|deletion review]] of the page listed in the heading. <span style="color:red;">'''Please do not modify it.'''</span>''
-|}