Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Arctic

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: delete. ‑Scottywong | [confer] || 20:08, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Arctic

Neglected portal.

Eleven never-updated selected articles created in August 2008.

Three never-updated selected bios created in August 2008, one in May 2010.

Errors

Kenojuak Ashevak died in January 2013
There are three species of Bowhead whale, not four
The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center ceased to exist in 2015, and in any case the DYK assertion is not supported by the article
DYK is promoting an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2007. That report ispractically a dinosaur as it was succeeded in 2014.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 14:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Agree did not notice it was so abandoned. Lets delete will be easier for me to start from scratch in this case.--Moxy 🍁 14:34, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Moxy 🍁 If you support deleting the current portal, care to cast an official delete vote to help make that happen? Newshunter12 (talk) 22:01, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete ...will redo next month.--Moxy 🍁 22:44, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete The decrepit portal has been abandoned for a decade and has no current maintainers and is full of serious errors. Had a very low 18 views per day in the first half of 2019, which is a sharp long-term decline from the 30 views per day it received in the second half of 2015, the earliest available viewing data. The B-Class head article Arctic, with its many rich and versatile navboxes and 1,251 views per day in the first half of 2019 is all readers need and want to explore this topic. I oppose re-creation as all of the above demonstrates no portal is viable, needed, or wanted by readers for this topic. Newshunter12 (talk) 22:01, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as qualified below, as per User:Mark Schierbecker - This portal had 18 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 1251 for the head article.
- Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Arctic/ shows 4 selected biographies and 11 general articles, which were content-forked in 2008. Some of the articles have been tweaked, but there have been no substantive updates. As noted by nominator, some of the articles are no longer correct, which illustrates that content-forking is an unsound architecture.
- There has been some recent maintenance by User:Moxy, but it appears that Moxy agrees that it is better to blow this portal up and start over.
- Presumably User:Moxy is requesting that the portal be deleted without prejudice to re-creation. I do not oppose re-creation if the new portal does not use content forks and has a maintenance plan, and if it is understood that a new portal may be reviewed in 90 days after creation, including for adequate pageviews, and a maintenance plan. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:53, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure any page has ever been deleted because of pages views...but I can increase them to we'll above current views by simply making them visible to all readers. That said...this portal..Canada, Australia and the USA portals ( one on genetics) are the only ones I have enough expertise in to create and maintain.--Moxy 🍁 01:04, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Moxy: AFAICS, the main portal link templates are hidden from mobile view along with categories and navboxes because they are all wrapped in <div role="navigation". So at some level of the interface design process, there has been a decision to exclude navigational elements from mobile view.

I understand that you want to increase the viewing of portals, but you are proposing to do so through bypassing a site-wide design decision. I urge again that rather than doing end-runs around site-wide design, you engage with the designers of mobile view to find out why navigation elements were excluded ... and then seek consensus on whether and how to add any of them back in again. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:01, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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 a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.

In this case I think that the appropriate new links would be to Portal:Geography. As ever, alternative suggestions welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:17, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Per nom and above, and if Moxy can redo a better version and becomes its maintainer, then good luck to them in doing that. Britishfinance (talk) 22:24, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, and oppose re-creation. This portal was created in 2008 at about the same time as WP:WikiProject Arctic. The portal seems to have been largely abandoned since shortly after its creation, with only minor changes since then. As a result, it has only a small set of articles, and all as content forks which have rotted.

There has been no discussion at Portal talk:Arctic since 2008, apart from an off-topic 2018 post about publishing some old material.[1]

Meanwhile, WP:WikiProject Arctic remained alive for longer than the portal, but I have just tagged it as inactive[2] per Template:WikiProject status#Usage:_Inactive_projects because the last non-mass-messaged human post on its talk page WT:WikiProject Arctic was in March 2015.

I also looked at WhatLinksHere from WikipediaTalk namespace, to see if any other WikiProjects showed any recent interest, but I didn't find any.

The rest of the backlinks from WikiProject talk pages seem to consist entirely of a series of cross-posted messages about the portal which were posted in 2008 by User:Carcharoth, who tried hard to drum up interest in the portal. In some cases there was some immediate followup discussion, but I found nothing after those initial threads had run its course.

Given this complete lack of recent interest from other editors and from WikiProjects, the offer by one participant in this MFD to rebuild the portal should be rejected. Portals are supposed to be an enhanced main page for a broad topic area, and even with the best will in the world, no single editor can encompass a broad NPOV vision of the topic as a whole; that role needs multiple people, who just aren't interested here.

Also, just keeping the maintenance going requires multiple editors. The archives of MFD contain many many dozens of examples of portals where a sincere and enthusiastic editor set out to do it alone, but sooner or later moved on to other things. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so they are entitled to do move on, but this portal has already been through one cycle of abandonment and decay, so there is no point in starting another. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - thank you for the ping, BHG. I understand the arguments being made here about portals (and have been following the discussions on and off for a while). I do hope that the same arguments are never made about articles! I'd be interested in seeing what Moxy can do with a new portal, but am not that invested either way. It would be good if those who are interested in aggregating Wikipedia content in this way could have a space to work in. Like a separate namespace. :-) I did see the point made the other day about how portals are in some ways redundant to how things work now (with mouseovers and previews and image galleries and the way navboxes are more functional - is there a clear summary of that anywhere that can be referred to?) - also the mobile versus desktop thing. Has there been any discussion of how wikibooks are different to portals? Carcharoth (talk) 13:21, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Carcharoth. The various namespaces have different purposes, so it's no surprise they have different deletion criteria. I would hate to see WP:NENAN applied to articles, or WP:GNG applied to templates. Same with articles vs portals.

Having a space for aggregating Wikipedia content doesn't mean we should keep failed attempts at aggregation.

AFAICS, most of those involved in portals over the last 9 months of intense debate have evolved their thinking in that time, tho in difft degrees and directions. I will try to consolidate my own current thoughts somewhere, and I also note that User talk:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace may be of interest.

But the one thing that's very clear from the viewing data is that readers are v little interested in portals as a whole. Whatever editors may hope they are doing by building portals, in practice their efforts are a hobby. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:51, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - No policy based rationale for deletion given. GMG ^talk 19:56, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.