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: Keep and improve. There is little practical use moving from the Portal namespace to the Draft namespace, either this is going to be improved on or it is not - suggest revisiting in 6 months if there have not been improvements. — xaosflux Talk 15:48, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Caribbean[edit]

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

Abandoned portal. You can tell it is abandoned because:

Portals require a broad enough scope to attract both readers and editors. This does not attract either. 780 views in 30 days by disappointed readers who are getting outdated info vs 98,000+ readers on Caribbean a page with many editors working on it and watching it. Legacypac (talk) 10:57, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Select [►] to view subcategories
Caribbean
Countries in the Caribbean
Dependent territories in the Caribbean
Caribbean-related lists
Buildings and structures in the Caribbean
Cannabis in the Caribbean
Culture of the Caribbean
Economy of the Caribbean
Education in the Caribbean
Environment of the Caribbean
Geography of the Caribbean
Government in the Caribbean
Health in the Caribbean
History of the Caribbean
Organisations based in the Caribbean
Caribbean people
People of the Caribbean
Politics of the Caribbean
Racism in the Caribbean
Regions of the Caribbean
Society of the Caribbean
West Indies
Images of the Caribbean
Caribbean stubs
– North America1000 16:30, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I agree it meets the guideline for breadth of subject matter but your !vote does not address the failure to of the portal to meet the guideline as a topic that attracts readers and editors. Legacypac (talk) 20:45, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(UTC)

News is just the easiest area to show how little interest there is in maintaining this. I agree there is scope for a proper portal but maintenance by interested editors is required. No portal is a required portal. Legacypac (talk) 23:55, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:12, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Pldx1 (talk) 13:17, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – I'm against using Vital articles (VA) assessments as a metric for portals on Wikipedia; the selection process at VA is very subjective, often opinion-based, sometimes based upon the simplest of straw polling, and is not reliable or objective. Assessment results often simply depend upon who shows up to "vote". North America1000 22:37, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would love to hear which standard you would propose as an alternative. I guess it is much easier to shoot down others' ideas than to proporse some of your own. UnitedStatesian (talk)
The discussion above is riddled with extreme euphemisms. For example, some editors say it needs to be "updated", and @Waggers says it needs some work ... which actually means "completely rebuilt from a blank sheet", because a set of 12-year-old content forks is no base from which to start building a portal which might actually add value for readers.
In the meantime, it is disruptive to continue to waste the time of readers by luring them to a page which has been abandoned for 12 years.
Notions that leaving it live will trigger improvement are implausible to the point of fantasy, because:
  1. There is no tag to identify long-term abandoned portals, and no category to track them, because the WP:WPPORT has never throughout its history engaged in any systematic quality-monitoring of portals .
  2. Category:All portals currently contains 1,331 portals, of which over 1,000 are in Category:Unassessed Portal pages. That's about 80% of portals to which to no assessment rating has ever been assigned. The portals project has simply never done basic monitoring of quality, let alone tracking of specific problems, which is why hundreds of abandoned portals have rotted for up to 13 years
  3. Building a decent portal which would actually add value to readers takes time and research, and knowledge of the topic. No particpant in this discussion has identified any editor with the skills and commitment to build and maintain a portal on this topic.
  4. Anyone who wants to build a decent portal on this topic may find parts of this abandoned relic to be valuable, which is why I advocate soft deletion or draftifying ... but I would prefer outright deletion to leaving this live. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:43, 11 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Similar wording has been i place for over 12 years. The lead of the September 2006‎ version says 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. Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance.
Sadly, some editors continue to misrepresent POG as some sort of licence to litter Wikipedia with abandoned portals, just because the scope is broad enough. POG is very clear that scope is a necessary condition, but an insufficient one: the portal must also be maintained.
It's all very easy to say "set up a system for improving portal quality". But with over 1,000 portals in poor shape, and few editors working on them, that improvemnt can never catch up with decay. If someone wants to create a portal on this topic which actually adds value and meet the core principle of WP:PORTAL — "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects" — then they can create a new shell in seconds. But a long-abandoned portal like this one has nothing worth incorporating into a new portal, and it is grossly unfair to readers to keep on luring them to a portal which simply wastes their time. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:37, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
What is actually happening here is that all these portals are being taken down by an elite cabal of deletionist Wikipedians without much input from anyone else. Unless someone is sitting on the page, you guys will overrun it with deletion requests simply because it is "unmaintained." I had no idea what was happening until I saw the Anthropology portal was deleted the other day. Who knew? Well, apparently BrownHairedGirl and Robert McClenon that's who -- same people who recommended this for deletion.
How about we get some more input before destroying all the portals?? --Tiredmeliorist (talk) 04:50, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oh dear. Elite cabal, eh? As in editors who launch a public discussion, based on the long-established portals guidelines?
Presumably I am being managed by the illuninati and lizards.
Your reason for keeping amounts to your statement that I personally like the portals themselves. Which is pure WP:ILIKEIT. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:55, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Whether there is a cabal behind any large virtual community has, since the early days of Usenet in the early 1980s, depended on what was meant by a cabal. Therefore the statements "There Is No Cabal" (WP:TINC) (and "There Is a Cabal") have always had some degree of dry on-line humor (that was sometimes missed, and taken to be either entirely serious or entirely unserious, both of which missed the point). However, the usual concept of a cabal, in virtual communities and the Internet, has implied a group that were acting more or less out of view, either secretly, or in a sort of open but quiet corner. Deletion in Wikipedia is not and cannot be done by a cabal. Deletion has done via MFD, which is a public Wikipedia forum, and some of the large deletions have been further publicized via central notice. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:08, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
User:Tiredmeliorist - There has been a cabal, however, not deleting portals, which cannot be done quietly. Deletion is noisy. The creation of portals, or of any other pages, can be done quietly. New pages are checked quietly via New Page Patrol, but its purpose is primarily to maintain the quality of articles and to screen out spam, advertising, undisclosed paid editing, libel, copyright infringement, patent nonsense, biographies of living persons violations, hoaxes, and other stuff that does not belong in the encyclopedia. There has been a cabal that I call the portal platoon, consisting of a few editors led by The Transhumanist (the platoon leader), organized as a WikiProject (some of which are quiet and active, as this one has been), which created thousands of low-quality portals simply because they liked portals or because creating portals was fun. Some other editors, including User:BrownHairedGirl, User:UnitedStatesian, User:Legacypac, and myself only noticed the thousands of portals a few months ago. Since then, we have been actively seeking as much input as we can about low-quality portals, and have been, with notice and discussion, identifying and deleting low-quality portals, both automated portals created by the portal platoon, and old long-abandoned portals. 'How about we get some more input'? We did get input, via the usual notice and discussion. If you want any particular deleted portal relisted, that can be done. We have sought input much more than the portal platoon, a cabal, who created thousands of portals without input and with no real reason. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:08, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Robert McClenon: Thanks, I appreciate the discussion (and clarification on the word "cabal", lol) --Tiredmeliorist (talk) 02:30, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Further Discussion of Portal:Caribbean, Portal:Anthropology, and Portals[edit]

If you think that Portal:Anthropology was deleted too quickly, you can ask for review at Deletion Review. It appears to have been a proper close after at least seven days, but I would not object to a temporary undeletion and a Relist. (I don’t know what other editors will say.)

I personally am agreeable to having this portal, Portal:Caribbean, relisted for one more week. It was nominated for deletion on 15 April, so that it has been open for discussion for a month now, but we are not trying to rush the deletion of portals. (A cabal of editors whom I characterize as the portal platoon were trying to rush the implementation of thousands of portals, but that is not the subject now, and we are not trying to rush the deletion of portals.)

The guidelines for portals have always said that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. The Caribbean and Anthropology are both broad subject areas, but we have found that broad subject areas attract readers for the articles, but (perhaps contrary to expectation) not for the portals, and that many portals have waited years for portal maintainers. See the essay on waiting for portal maintainers. Portal:Caribbean attracted an average of 24 daily page views between 1 January 2019 and 28 February 2019, while Caribbean attracted 3,531 page views during that period. Portals fail to attract readers and portal maintainers. Robert McClenon (talk) 10:48, 17 May 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.


More