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: No consensus . I've read this thing nearing a dozen times now, and I've not gotten much of anywhere. The delete voters make the arguments that these are relatively minor places that aren't of broad interest beyond mainspace; I'm inclined to agree. The keep !voters make the argument that these have individual merit and are are very different from each other; I'm inclined to agree, especially on the second point (we have a small village that's a featured article with a dedicated maintainer and a city that no longer properly exists but had 20x the population).

A lot of the discussion touches on whether there should be a strict population cutoff, but the merits (much less the boundaries) haven't been adequately discussed and debated. We have editors bringing that idea up — the below discussion shows some of the difficulty in linking that to quality and coverage — but there isn't a cohesive, focused discussion amongst several editors I can point to. This discussion does a good job showcasing not only why having a good set of criteria is important, but also why having hard and fast rules with strict boundaries is difficult and not the wikipedia-way.

Anyway, I don't think there's agreement on what to do with most of these. This is a no consensus close, so if there is value in discussing some individually, this shouldn't prevent that. I'm defaulting to delete for Portal:Alhambra, California, however. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:50, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Random Small City Portals[edit]

Portal:Alhambra, California (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:Boca Raton, Florida (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:Briarcliff Manor, New York (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) pop 7800

Portal:New Rochelle, New York (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:City of Bankstown (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) (city no longer exists)

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

Alhambra for example is a nice California town with 83,000 people. Boca Raton, New Rochelle and Aylesbury are similar sized. No evident reason for these places to have a portal. The world of articles is the predictable pages on the high school, the school district, a road that is partly in the city, and for some reason a pizza chain for Alhambra. Sets a bad precedent for creating portals on smaller cities. Anyone is welcome to bundle in other small city portals. There are a bunch of them. WP:X3 as drafted does not apply to everything here as different creators. Legacypac (talk) 02:36, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Robert McClenon (talk) 04:03, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Check out WP:NOTAVOTE, "most decisions on Wikipedia are made on the basis of consensus, not on vote-counting or majority rule". North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:44, 26 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Pinging Robert McClenon so he may provide a deletion rationale if he wants. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:55, 26 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong keep — There is no rule on the importance of a topic, or size of a city, for portals; likewise there is no rule for notability based on a city's size, we include all populated places as part of Wikipedia's function as a gazetteer (WP:5P). This MfD breaks the very first pillar. There is also a strong push toward highlighting local communities better on Wikipedia, like Wiki Loves Your Community or the MonmouthpediA project. These efforts should be lauded, not attacked with MfDs.

In the case of Briarcliff Manor, I spent countless hours developing 20 or so articles on the village into GAs and FAs. I created the portal (which looked better before automation came in), and I strongly believe portals are the most reader-friendly avenue for exploring a topic. If readers wanted to explore the other 20 articles on Briarcliff, where else would they go? Not all of them are linked from the main article, and they're not going to understand categories and subcategories. Portals give them an immersive experience of images, facts, articles, dates, bios, and more, that is much more useful to a new reader than anything else here. ɱ (talk) 14:29, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

4127 page views for the head article vs 125 page views for the portal suggests readers find the article far more reader friendly. Legacypac (talk) 14:56, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That’s not in any way a logical method for determining reader-friendliness. ɱ (talk) 15:16, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

how so? If readers found portals useful we would see a lot more usage, yet all portals get minimal usage. 125 page views is actually pretty high for a portal. Legacypac (talk) 15:23, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like you're gunning for another proposal for mass-deletion of portals, which is not what this MfD is about, and that proposal just recently failed. Anyway, page views are widely influenced by accessibility - if the portal was by the lede like some other key links, it would get a much higher readership. Instead it's far, far down the article, near the bottom, and doesn't even display on the app or mobile version, which are increasingly becoming the predominant methods to read Wikipedia. ɱ (talk) 15:30, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you think readership is low, look at New York City, which has 496,000 views vs 2,400 for its portal (.5%) vs 3% for Briarcliff, six times the relative amount. ɱ (talk) 15:36, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:POG "Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" Legacypac (talk) 15:38, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A guideline that I don't have to follow. I am the portal maintainer of the Briarcliff portal; the other ones I'm not certain of. It still is counter to WP:5P that Wikipedia acts as a gazetteer for all communities, and thus communities inherently have a right to articles and therefore should have a right to organize themselves with categories, portals, navboxes, everything that larger communities should. I should bring this up to the movement of Wikipedians who actively write and advocate for expansion of community articles, because this just seems biased against smaller towns and cities, which makes no sense. ɱ (talk) 16:30, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(←) notifying Wikipedia:WikiProject United States, Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities, Wikipedia:WikiProject New York (state), Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as relevant WikiProjects. ɱ (talk) 16:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. The fact is, we have guidelines for these, and they say portals should be for large subject areas, and these portals don't meet that. Community consensus has been clearly shown to be against creating articles for minor topics like these. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 16:52, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  If I spent hours creating a visual guide to the articles I spent days writing, and then 4,000 people viewed and used it, I'd say that's a success, and not something to toss out, using arbitrary standards of cities worthy and unworthy of organizational tools like portals. Where's the line? 8,000 people, 80,000, 800,000? 8 million? ɱ (talk) 16:46, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Where's the precedents you're citing here? ɱ (talk) 16:57, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:POG — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 22:42, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  What's really going on here is that a small group of editors wish to choose these things on behalf of the rest of us and are aggressively gaming process to that effect, hence this and related XFDs. With no input whatsoever from the editors who have worked on the articles in question, Portal:University of Alaska Fairbanks was recently created. Considering that there's no portal on the University of Alaska as a whole, I wouldn't call this a broad enough topic for a separate portal. Moreover, most subarticles related to UAF are substubs or stubs which have seen little improvement, with many created by COI editors. The exception is the article on the ice hockey team, which suffers from the same fanboy POV that far too many ice hockey-related articles suffer from. Seeing a portal like that suggests yet another move towards the encyclopedia's content consisting of what certain editors like or don't like instead of anything remotely resembling collaboration or broad editor interest. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:24, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  How are we "gaming process"? You have equal right to vote in these MfDs, and they stay open for a reasonable time. Please do not cast aspersions. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 22:42, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

All inhabited place Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019. You can see the arguments made

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted

Legacypac (talk) 17:36, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• USCounties only got 7 votes, not nearly a true wide vote.
• Districts of India was semi-automatic, not curated or with a wide scope.
• Neighborhoods in Portland is a strawman, I'm not talking about neighborhoods.
• Allen Park and the related portals were all automatic, not curated or with a wide scope.
• Agoura Hulls had a shameful single vote. That should not fly.
• Benito Juárez likewise with three votes is shameful.
• Lents is another neighborhood, a strawman argument.
• Ankaran, with only three votes, is a shameful close as well.

These aren't examples. They're mockeries. ɱ (talk) 18:00, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• 7 votes is really good for an MfD, and if all 3 votes on some of the less well-attended MfDs are for "delete", closing as delete is quite reasonable. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 13:22, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As well, per this deletion discussion, WP:POG has established the precedent that portals should at least contain/connect to about 20 articles. Briarcliff Manor has at least 26, meaning that it passes the threshold for minimum number of articles. ɱ (talk) 18:08, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree entirely, it's just you and Legacypac and others in a small group just continually deleting. To have a fair vote, the creator should provide input, WikiProjects should, etc. A larger consensus than just the MfD page stalkers. ɱ (talk) 16:24, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You are always welcome to notify WikiProjects as long as it’s not canvassing. On your other point, WP:TINC — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 18:45, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• The MfDs listed are all of the ones on inhabited places as noted. A town is smaller/narrower scope than a county. 20 articles is a rock bottom minimum part of WP:POG - something that has not passed an RFC or gained widespread community support. There is now a prohibition on mass creation that will stand until a new guideline is approved by the community. Legacypac (talk) 18:16, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You're still being misleading; other voters will just see the list of precedents and be like, "oh, sure, delete", but almost none apply, and you even stated in one that you were spreading out the nominations (not several portals in one nom) in order to give the impression of more nominations against small city portals. That's essentially fraud. As for widespread community support, clearly nothing here needs or has that. We don't have any requirements for the notability of portals, there are no limits to the size, number, or scope of portals. As you stated, Briarcliff Manor passes POG as broad enough to warrant a portal. ɱ (talk) 18:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You can retract that false statement/personal attack please. Legacypac (talk) 18:48, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please learn the distinction between personal attacks and simple debate. I called your act fraud because I view it that way. I am not insulting any personal aspect of you, name-calling, or anything. Simply, your act of spreading out nominations and then listing them all in further deletion debates is deception for your own gain, to further your own beliefs. ɱ (talk) 20:30, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I never said I was spreading out nominations - you fabricated that. On the contrary I've been batching nominations. Legacypac (talk) 09:02, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep — Here we have yet another case of the usual WP:OWN editors attempting to take over as much of the encyclopedia as they possibly can while making no effort of their own to actually improve any of the content involved. Looks like I correctly predicted where the automation of portals was taking us. Just months ago, the nominator was throwing around the term "collaboration" while at the same time attempting to stifle my efforts at collaboration elsewhere on the encyclopedia. Time to put a stop to nonsense like this. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 02:13, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep:
  • Portal:New Rochelle, New York
  • Portal:Briarcliff Manor, New York
  • Portal:Aylesbury

These portals meet Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines, draw from an appropriate selection of articles, and serves as useful navigational pages. Furthermore, WP:X3 is mentioned in the nomination, but this is only a proposal, and is not an actual criteria for speedy deletion. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:59, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry these fail WP:POG portal guidelines, even as loose as they are. X3 will pass, and should have been closed already frankly. Otherwise I expect all 5500 portals will be subjected to MfD which is a big waste of time.

A comment above suggests portals should be linked from the lede of articles. Why would we create such circular links? If portals are a navigational aid why does a person already on the article need to go to a portal to get back to the article? The article link system is a proven successful way to navigate. Portal view stats show very few readers find them useful. Legacypac (talk) 18:40, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Sorry these fail WP:POG portal guidelines, even as loose as they are." Which part of the guideline? Because the standard for POG is that about 20 articles makes the portal broad enough to stay. ɱ (talk) 15:34, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"A portal helps to browse on a particular subject, hence the subject of a portal should be broad so that it presents a diversified content. The portal subject area should have enough interest and articles to sustain a portal, including enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section. To aid in this, the portal should be associated with a WikiProject to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal." The 20 articles is not even in the guideline it is something project members have mentioned. Legacypac (talk) 17:51, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That is totally out of date. That guideline was never followed. People just made portals on what interested them. And, so by the time of the RfC WP:ENDPORTALS in 2018, portals represented a wide range of scope, yet the community decided to keep them all. That set of 1500 portals is the representative set. Portals of similar scope to the portals in that set are okay by the community.    — The Transhumanist   20:37, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – This MfD attempts to override community consensus. The community decided to keep Portal:Briarcliff in the RfC WP:ENDPORTALS, and all other portals. The approximately 1500 portals that existed at that time, including Portal:Briarcliff, represented a wide range of scope; some had over a hundred entries in them, while others had just a few. Yet, the community decided to keep them all. The portals guideline has not been updated to reflect the community consensus established there. WikiProjects should never have been included in the guideline, as that violates WP:OWN. As coverage grows on these subjects, so will these portals' coverage of it, automatically. Also, the Portals WikiProject is dedicated to improving portal design further, including how and from where entries are automatically gathered. As the tech improves, so will the individual portals.    — The Transhumanist   20:37, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • The RfC decided that portals (as a type of pages) can continue to exist. It did not conclude (or even discuss) that every single portal which existed at that time may exist and can never be deleted, which is what you seem to argue. The community did not decide "to keep them all", as you claim: the community decided not to delet them all, which is a completely different concept. You seem to have learned nothing at all from all the recent discussions about portals (nor from the RfC, in fact), and still haev a blind belief in the superiority of your technological solutions, even if they have been shown again and again to create serious problems, and even though it has become clear that many portals where you changed the earlier, manual versions to your automated ones have become a lot worse in the process. Fram (talk) 09:24, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Given the total cluelessness and/or blatant misstatement about the WP:ENDPORTALS RFC how should we be dealing with TTH continued involvement in portals? It sounds like he believes every preexisting portal prior to the RFC is now protected from deletion. That fits with his insistence on tagging each one with a deletion tag like we were discussing deletion of each page. For a big concept guy who insists on being the guy who organizing the whole of Wikipedia, I'm surprised TTH is confusing Meta discussion with specific discussion of individual pages. Legacypac (talk) 16:03, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  This is a ridiculous claim. The RFC was a blanket statement on all portals. It did not represent a judgment on any individual portal. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 12:45, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete the new ones like Portal:Aylesbury, discuss the remainder separately. Fram (talk) 09:24, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Please can you specify which you are voting for and which against? Thanks ɱ (talk) 14:48, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Delete Portal:Alhambra, California, Portal:Boca Raton, Florida and Portal:Aylesbury. Exclude the others from this nomination (note: this isn't necessarily a vote against deletion of those, just that I think we do better in keeping the auto-generated ones and the others separate at MfD). Fram (talk) 15:15, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep any on actual cities like Boca Raton (not towns/neighborhoods/census-designated places/suburbs) and on regional capitals like Aylesbury, as of sufficient encyclopedic interest to support portals. "They're not good enough right this second" isn't a deletion rationale, per WP:AADD#Surmountable problems. Merge and redirect those on smaller places to portals on larger areas. Redirects are cheap and will help prevent re-creation of town/'hood portals we'll never need in any form.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:56, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  This idea to keep portals on cities and delete portals on towns is ridiculous. Incorporated title really means little in terms of significance. For example, the town of Hempstead is larger than the cities Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Yonkers, etc., making Hempstead the second-most-populous place in New York. Meanwhile, the official city of Edge Hill in Georgia has 24 people. So let's throw that out of the idea bucket. ɱ (talk) 18:06, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  See WP:JERK and don't throw words like "ridiculous" at people you're probably misinterpreting. >;-) It's pretty obvious I mean populous places of major notability versus tiny places we include in WP just for completeness's sake. Given that how "town", "city", etc., are defined legally varies widely by jurisdiction (and not always consistently within one), it cannot possibly be the case that I mean "that which officially bears a designation of 'town'", especially when I couched all of this, across this entire series of MfDs, in terms of towns/neighborhoods/boroughs/"small cities"/CDPs versus "real cities"/metro areas/counties/large subnational regions (in non-tiny nations), with the former not having sufficient reader encyclopedic interest for portals, but the latter category clearly having it. Pretty much no one on earth is actually going to think of Edge Hill, Georgia [US], as a "city", no matter what some government paperwork says in a file somewhere. In plain English, it is a town at best, more like a village or hamlet.

  If we need to establish a criterion, then let's do it: 50K people? 75K? 100K? 250K? 500K? We should pick something and stick to it, however arbitrary it might be. PS: The need to upmerge smaller towns and such to bigger portals shows why the thinly-attended deletion of US county portals was a WP:FALSECONSENSUS mistake. We're just going to have to end up re-creating them to merge all these town portals to, which collectively (after merger) obviously hold enough reader interest and enough article entries for broader-area portals, but do not for micro-area portals.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:50, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You are being ridiculous. Notability isn't determined by how populated a city is. Can I delete the portal on Hollywood? It's just a neighborhood... Meanwhile New Rochelle as a city has far less notability. We must maintain portals on populated places of all sizes, as long as people are willing to create them, and perhaps we can institute a guideline for number of articles it pertains to. ɱ (talk) 16:07, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NOTBIGENOUGH. "Notability isn't determined by something's quantity of members, but rather by the quality of the subject's verifiable, reliable sources." ɱ (talk) 16:26, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all, plainly does not meet WP:POG. ... broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers ... broad so that it presents a diversified content ... should be associated with a WikiProject ... should not be a vehicle for advocacy or advertisement ... should not cover too narrow a scope ... Location-based portals are not broad enough, and are sure to become a vehicle for advertisement. Portals should be reserved for topics so broad that we cannot fit all the relevant links into a single article. And we can fit a lot of links in an article. I could see a Portal:London or a Portal:California or a Portal:Australia, where we would have hundreds of articles. These portals are not broad enough; our main articles on these places include everything the portals include, and more. Leviv ich 19:45, 23 March 2019 (UTC)::[reply]

This is incredibly vague, there is no established guideline for just how broad a subject has to be. How about 26 articles in the topic? I think having a portal to organize 26 long and well-developed articles makes sense. As well, the guideline you're citing has established 20 articles as a minimum, so thank you for citing a guideline that defeats your argument. ɱ (talk) 16:11, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

POG does not establish a 20-article minimum. It defines "a good number of articles", in the "article selection" as "Good number means about 20 articles, though this figure may vary from case to case and is intended as a rough guide rather than a hard principle." Doesn't look to me like these portals have 20 selected articles. Delete per POG. Leviv ich 20:23, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

POG established that portals should have at least 20 articles in them, in order to have a "good number of articles" for selection. That 20-article figure has been noted in multiple MfDs and other portal discussions as a rough consensus for the minimum number of articles needed in a portal. Briarcliff has 26. Meanwhile your argument that POG requires broad subjects is irrelevant - please define which cities and towns are broad and which aren't and cite some consensus... Please... Wikipedia's consensus is that all cities, towns, villages are broad enough topics to warrant articles (WP:5P); why not portals as well? ɱ (talk) 20:39, 31 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• 1 million people for a city or metro area, assuming no major over lap with a small country/city state portal or a subnational region portal - ie Beijing is both city and a province level division. And don't create Portal:Vancouver and Porta;:Greater Vancouver and Portal:Lower Mainland as these overlap a lot. Legacypac (talk) 20:12, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• WP:ITSLOCAL: "Notability is not about assigning an elite status to a select group of subjects. It is about having the ability to write neutral, verifiable, encyclopedic-style information about them." Nothing in Wikipedia relies on how large a city is for notability. Notability always relies on neutral, independent, authoritative sources. "Wikipedia is not limited to subjects that everyone in the world knows or will have a good chance of knowing. Being a global encyclopedia, Wikipedia can cover a wide range of topics, many of them pertaining to the culture of a single country, language, or an ethnic group living in one part of the world. The people living in a single city or town and everything they have built around them are likewise a culture and society of their own."
• "Another question is where to draw the line on a subject as being "local". Local could mean limited to a city or town. But others may view a state, province, or other similar region as being local. And such divisions vary in size throughout the world. And though the boundaries of a jurisdiction are legally defined, determining a distance from that location in which coverage would be non-local is not possible." ɱ (talk) 16:20, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is a difference between portals which need to cover broad topics according to the guideline and articles which need to meet notability guidelines. Claiming the portal meets part of the guideline with 26 related articles but tossing the scope part of the guideline because you don't like it is not correct. It's like newbies who say it's all sourced (V) but don't like the N part. I get you are passionate about your town, but there are much more productive ways to showcases your town to the world then a portal. Legacypac (talk) 18:19, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The guideline is out-of-date, vague, and clearly lacks consensus. Please establish actual criteria before trying to delete portals just based on "I think it's too small". The scope part is incredibly vague; the 20-article idea has backing in the community. And, yes, guidelines apply to all of the English Wikipedia, both articles and portals. Notability depends on reliable sources. Geographic scope is one of several Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. ɱ (talk) 18:50, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You have it backward. If you want portals YOU revise the guideline and get it approved via RFC. You can't dismiss and ignore what little guideline we have and tell anyone who objects to fix the guideline you broke. Legacypac (talk) 19:36, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You're just too stubborn to admit it doesn't break the wildly vague and outdated guideline, something I'm not fully bound to follow. Your idea is backward: if you want to nominate small city portals for deletion, you have to gain consensus for a proper portal notability policy, which would, in your eyes, include details on why and which small cities cannot, for silly reasons, not have their own portals. Then take these to MfD for God's sake. ɱ (talk) 20:18, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This position regarding the portal guidelines seems to be a case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT. I disagree with Legacypac on several things; in particular, I don’t think all portals should be deleted—just the ones that don’t meet our guidelines. Here, though, he is right. You do not need to create a new comprehensive guideline every time you want to delete a page if there are existing guidelines that are applicable. Of course, if you want to start an RfC for updating WP:POG or creating a portal notability guideline, go ahead. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 18:45, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well apparently Legacypac already did this in secret during this MfD and didn't inform any of us. That's sly and deceiving, and you commented there and didn't either; I've lost all faith. If there already is a discussion about whether or not three or twenty articles are needed, why are we even discussing here? Also, consensus seems to be for only three articles needed, so this MfD should rightfully fail. ɱ (talk) 17:11, 26 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:BEBOLD. Rather than complaining about how someone else didn’t do something, you should do it yourself. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:54, 26 March 2019

(UTC)

As an experienced editor you should know the difference between a Speedy deletion criteria where we delete pages without discussion and a content guideline where we specify minimum standards. If you believe all guidelines about articles apply to portals (ie: WP:GEOLAND) then where are is the compliance with WP:V references? Legacypac (talk) 16:19, 27 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What do you think 242 references isn't enough? Portals just mirror content from articles that need to be sourced; same thing as that lead paragraphs don't need cites so long as the information is reliably sourced later on. And yeah, I'm aware you're also trying to be able to speedy-delete all of these articles too, without telling me or any other user. That's sly to be saying I should open a debate about minimum article requirements for a portal exactly at the same time as you're discussing it while trying to gain powers to literally blow past any MfDs and delete portals at your leisure. ɱ (talk) 15:09, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – In the 2014 discussion at Wikipedia talk:Portal/Guidelines/Archive 7 § References in portals, users were against references being existent in portals. As such, a lack of sources does not qualify deletion. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:02, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The portals listed above have plenty of articles linked to them. The purpose of portals is to link to articles to help maintain Wikipedia. All of the portals do that. The size of the city is not as relevant as whether there is enough content, in the form of articles, to justify a portal. There is enough for the portals above, evidenced by the different links to articles in each portal's jurisdiction. Portals can also add more content in the future, making them more important going forward. PointsofNoReturn (talk) 16:30, 26 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A small city will almost never ever have enough related content to support a portal. The only exceptions might be some small place with an amazing history like Delphi but then the portal would be about the history of the place not the modern small town. The best developed small city topics have pages about the school district, the high schools, maybe a university, some parks, a library system, maybe some business based there. All mundane predictable stuff. Legacypac (talk) 16:19, 27 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is the 20 article rule a hard count, where above that number a portal is kept? I'd day that some portals having close to 20 articles would mean that the portals should be kept. Surely portals should be kept if they have enough content about them. One of the portals does have more than 20 articles, for example. I don't think just being a small city means that the topic cannot have a portal, especially if there are enough relevant articles about the small city. The other portals could be brought to that level, but it would take time. PointsofNoReturn (talk) 04:41, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all six We have to assess these six portals using the WP:POG guideline that we have, not some theoretical guideline that may someday exist. These topics are not broad enough to meet the current guideline's requirement; in addition to the guideline's mention (in a footnote) of a number of related articles, it also mentions a quality standard for the related articles, which the !keep voters are ignoring here. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:10, 27 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@UnitedStatesian: So your only rationale here for deleting is that you think some topics are not broad in your opinion? And that the related articles are of a poor quality? So do you believe the Briarcliff articles are of a poor quality? Which include two Featured Articles, one Featured List and seventeen Good Articles? And you want to delete the portal that I spent countless hours shaping into a really strong portal? Because its quality is poor? Literally I dare you to find a city with a better percentage of good articles on its portal. ɱ (talk) 12:18, 27 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is his only rationale for deletion, because that’s what it says in WP:POG. Compare this to your claim that there is no requirement on the importance of a topic; in fact, this is directly contradicted by our guidelines. The only argument you have implied that holds any weight is that portals with maintainers should be safer. Please stop harassing every user you disagree with. You have made your point. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 14:50, 27 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

DON'T talk for people, don't assume what they're thinking and speak for them. I pinged him so that he may provide an answer; your continued complaints to me and sticking POG in my face isn't going to help, and is worse than me even just asking for clarification with his flawed deletion argument (which totally ignored the good standards of the Briarcliff topic). ɱ (talk) 15:12, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What pythoncoder wrote is correct. I think you confuse depth of a topic's coverage on Wikipedia (which in this case is admirably deep, due in large part to your diligent efforts) with breadth of the topic in general (which is completely independent of how extensively Wikipedia covers the topic). Breadth is what the WP:POG guideline requires, and a single town on earth does not have that required level of topic breadth. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:39, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very unique interpretation of POG; a stance that you're unique in taking. There's nothing in that or any policy that defines breadth vs. depth. And I disagree that any city like Yonkers has any special sort of magical "breadth" that a smaller town such as Briarcliff lacks. This is wishful thinking on your part. ɱ (talk) 15:28, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. And I note there is no Portal:Yonkers, (and would predict that all the other Portals for similarly sized settlements that DO exist will go also). Portal:Jerusalem may have the required topic breadth. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:59, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I know other stuff exists. You still have some random approach to which cities are notable enough and which aren't. Funny you thought you deleted Yonkers' portal. It is one of the largest cities in NY and even in the US, with more people than the nationally-known Salt Lake City, Montgomery AL, Little Rock, Tallahassee, Providence RI, etc. so you clearly don't know what you're talking about Unitedstatesian. ɱ (talk) 16:13, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – WP:X3 is a present proposal discussion; it is not a guideline or policy. As such, whether or not a portal was created before or after the discussion commenced is not a valid qualifier for deletion. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:25, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Considering that the nomination said "WP:X3 as drafted does not apply to everything here as different creators.", your copy-pasted comment here is rather meaningless. Fram (talk) 09:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Not to mention that the X3 proposal has closed as no consensus, so here at MfD is the only place we will be now (unless some of the creators use CSD U5). UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:24, 4 April 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.