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: Moved. I'm not sure if I exactly get the logic of moving this to projectspace rather than portalspace. However, the consensus is rather clear that people agree that this portal has a use for editors. A good question that Bermicourt asked was if people agree that this portal is doing no harm, then why not leave it alone? That really never got an answer (personally speaking). Britishfinance also raised a good point that there might be a useful navbox that may be created based off this page.
Regardless, there was no consensus to leave the portal as it was, and there was not sufficient consensus to delete it either. The only option that remains is to move it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Harz. (non-admin closure) –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 16:36, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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

• This is a toy portal that is even less viewed than most of the toy portals created by User:Bermicourt, who builds toy portals and maintains them well. This portal was named Portal:Harz Mountains, but was renamed in May 2019 to Portal:Harz, which is a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic that distracts from the counting of the lifeboats. In the third quarter of 2019, the portal had 1 daily pageview. That is 73 total views of the portal. The head article had 186 daily average pageviews.
  • The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
  • This portal was nominated for deletion in April 2019, and was kept after discussion on 15 April 2019. A Keep generally precludes renomination for six months, which has expired. I have generally been neutral about well-maintained toy portals, but this is remarkable for the lack of attention to it.
  • This portal does not have reader-facing articles as such, but has reader-facing lists of articles, providing 247 topics for the reader to click on and view. This is a very generous set of articles. I have not checked what the quality ratings of the articles is. Since the names of the articles display the articles, there is no content rot. However, the lists themselves require maintenance, in that they must be updated if articles are moved or deleted, and should be expanded if articles are created. There is a list of articles to be added, in red, which is a project-oriented use of the portal rather than a reader-oriented use of the portal.
  • I have previously objected to the unilateral moving of portals after they were nominated for deletion. In this case I will not object to the moving of this portal as an alternative to deletion if no one else objects. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:25, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Keep or Move to Project Space. This portal was instrumental in the rapid creation of an extensive and balanced range of articles on the topic and acts as an instant overview of the subject. If not wanted in portal space it should be moved to the Germany project space where project editors can continue to make use of it. Bermicourt (talk) 21:13, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

BTW this portal was nominated for deletion only in April this year and the consensus was "keep". Also the description of "toy portals" by Robert McClenon says that " if toy portals are maintained well by their originator, they do not satisfy the portal guidelines [which are now effectively deprecated anyway], but they do no harm, and we can Use Common Sense and leave them alone." So why aren't we leaving this one alone? Bermicourt (talk) 13:07, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete a mountain range doesn't need a portal.Catfurball (talk) 16:11, 1 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 an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Germany), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:56, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete or Move to Project Space. This is an almost unviewed portal about an informal national sub-division, with no interest from maintainers or from WikiProjects.

It got a median of only 2 views per day in 2019 Q3, which is below even the usual background noise of editors poking about. (Note that is a slightly higher figure than posted above by @Robert McClenon, because Robert forgot to include the old title).

The evidence of 7 months of scrutiny of portals at MFD has shown that even formal sub-national regions rarely reach a point of viability (almost half the US state portals have been deleted), and informal regions almost never make viable portals.

In this case, there is no sign of interest from other editors. Portal talk:Harz has had no discussion ever, so I looked for discussion on WikiProject talk pages, using whatlinkshere for both the old title "Portal:Harz Mountains" and the new title "Portal:Harz". I found:

1. October 2009: WT:WikiProject Germany/Archive 12#New_portal:_Harz_Mountains, announcement of the portal's creation
2. July 2010: WT:WikiProject Germany/Archive 14#New_portal_-_East_Frisia, a passing mention when another new portal was created
3. May 2011: WT:WikiProject Germany/Archive 16#Proposal for taskforce on East Germany, a passing mention in a discussion about East Germany
4. April 2019: WT:WikiProject Germany/Archive 23#Another_Germany_portal_up_for_deletion, a notification of WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Harz Mountains

So there's no sign anywhere that anyone other than the creator is interested in the portal. And the creator doesn't seem very interested either: the selected article Harzer Wandernadel is unchanged since the portal's creation in 2009[1], and the portal was a sea of undisambiguated links until I did a big cleanup in April 2019,[2] which must have been years overdue.

So I see no reason to keep this as a portal. If @Bermicourt believes that it would be useful in project space, I have no objection to it being moved there. But please, Bermicourt, leave it until the MFD is closed and it can be moved by an admin, because admins have the ability to move without leaving redirects. I manually tidied up the redirects after previous non-admin portal moves, and it's a tedious job. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the correction, User:BrownHairedGirl - That further illustrates how the renaming of portals complicates collection of metrics. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:05, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete: per nom and referenced consensus regarding portal inclusion and scope. SITH (talk) 12:38, 2 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Move to Project Space as a functional compromise relative to the above discussion. This option should also be considered for other portals nominated for deletion into the future. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:42, 2 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • These mega-navbox-style portals have a purpose in portalspace, because their collection of redlinks serves as a worklist. That is not the case with preview-excerpt-style of portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:04, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Why don't we convert the Harz Portal into a Harz NavBox and transclude it onto all relevant WP pages (there is no Harz NavBox as far as I can see)? Surely this is the makings of an excellent NavBox on the topic, and transcluding it on all relevant pages would give it more exposure and oversight? Am I missing something? Britishfinance (talk) 16:26, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete or Move to Project Space per the thorough investigation of the portal by @Robert McClenon and @BrownHairedGirl. This portal is useless in portal space but its list of red links could add something of value in project space, so I don't object to it being moved there after this MfD has been closed. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:44, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Move to Project Space – if it's useful to the WikiProject, why not. If it's not, they can delete it. – Levivich 05:29, 9 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.