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. One user's efforts to refresh the portal and continue maintaining it seem to have caused enough of a stir to make the consensus unclear and therefore save this portal from deletion. However, if the maintenance of this portal is not sustained, or if the newly updated portal doesn't produce any effect on article traffic, the consensus on a future MfD could be different. ‑Scottywong| confabulate _ 18:01, 11 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Vietnam[edit]

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

Abandoned portal. One selected article, which was last updated in 2010. DYK curiously has DD/MM/YYYY entry dates, suggesting creator was ambitiously intending to update semi-weekly; last updated July 2010. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 03:37, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – No prejudice against re-creation of a curated, complete portal. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 05:08, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, with prejudice against re-creation.

"Abandoned" is an inadequate term for this portal. This one was really never even created. It has only one selected article, last updated in 2010[1], and it has no list of topics.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In this case, we don't need to make estimates of likelihood, because we have clear evidence that in the 9 years since 2010‎, this portal has attracted no maintainers.

An abandoned portal such as this is significantly worse than no portal, because it misleads readers and wastes their time. The existence of a portal promises a gateway to more topics, but instead the poor reader lured to this abandoned junk will have been tricked by a false promise.

The C-class head article Vietnam is a vastly better navigational hub than this abandoned portal. Also, the head article is written in summary style, so it is also a vastly better showcase. As with most portals, this one is a failed solution in search of a problem. So just delete it and don't re-create it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:57, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete this portal is terrible, one selected article and no selected biography section, what a shame.Catfurball (talk) 20:12, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – Please note that the portal has been significantly expanded, and now presents much more content. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 13:51, 3 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete – This portal was created in 2007 by an editor whose only activity was creating this portal, and who then went away. Creating a portal is fun; maintaining it is work. The only maintenance has been on the DYKs in 2010. The portal has only ever had two articles by the most generous possible count. I agree that the portal is terrible, and will not disagree with the statement that it has only one article, but I prefer to count generously when it does not matter. The portal has had 32 daily pageviews, which is better than some, but is less than 0.5% of the 9362 daily pageviews for the article Vietnam. The portal has a red notation that there is a language markup error, just another sign that it has not been maintained. This portal does not appear to have been assessed since portal assessment was introduced a year ago, which does not give much reason to expect that portal advocates will be able to design a properly built portal; but if another editor wants to develop a portal that does not rely on subpages, which are a failure, they know where Deletion Review is. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:22, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Please keep: Could we please have a moratorium on deletions of national portals? These national portals can be rebuilt and updated. This is just creating chaos with no benefit to Wikipedia. Please see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals for the current impact. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 23:07, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• No moratorium. These abandoned portals have been wasting the the time and energy of readers and editors for years. They don't just fail to add value; they actively mislead, by providing outdated or incomplete information.

The only chaos here is in Buaidh's imagination and in the list of redlinks which he has created. Wikipedia is significantly improved by the removal of unused, misleading, badly-designed portals which readers avoid.

It is very easy to to make glib statements that portals can be rebuilt and updated. The reality is that maintaining them requires a lot of ongoing work by a lot of editors, and in face of the evidence of long-term neglect it is utterly implausible to simply state that this can end. There might be some credibility to such a statement if there was evidence of a team of active maintainers had formed, but there is no such evidence. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:37, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. As a portal about an entire nation it obviously meets the portal guideline demand for a broad subject area. It has the potential to attract a large number of readers and maintainers according to the guideline. If it does not, then it must be because it requires improvement. And the correct line of correction for content that requires improvement is not deletion. There is no deadline. --Hecato (talk) 08:35, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply. Portals are not content. They are tools for navigating and/or showcasing content, and as such are subject to different deletion criteria than the actual content of the encyclopedia.
  • Also, as Hecato well knows by now, PG does not require some vague "broad subject area". It is much more precise than that. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Note: not just "potential" to attract, but likely to attract. ("Potential" means probability greater than 0, but "likely" means probability greater than 0.5).

In this case the evidence is of the past decade is clearly that the portal is not likely to attract readers and editors. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:13, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Additional note. There has also been some activity from various editors, updating this portal. Replacing the Intro with a transclusion for instance. This appears to always happen when poorly maintained portals get nominated for deletion. Maybe trying to make people aware of the lack of maintenance would be a better way of fixing portals than jumping straight to deletion, as there appear to be some interested editors. Just a thought. --Hecato (talk) 09:32, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - per WP:NEGLECT, I am also voting keep as I see no value in WP:IDONTLIKEIT comments. In this case we are talking about an entire country, it does not fall under too narrow of a scope. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:36, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply. WP:NEGLECT is irrelevant. It is an essay, rather than policy or guideline, and as such it has zero status. In any case, it is all about articles, and portals are not articles.

The reasons given for deletion are reasoned and policy-based and accompanied by detailed evidence. Knowledgekid87's dismissal of them as IDONTLIKEIT is a dishonest misrepresentation of the contributions of other editors.

It's also clear that Knowledgekid87 has not read WP:POG, which defines scope in terms of ability to sustain a viable portal. It requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but Knowledgekid87 chooses to ignore everything after the comma.

So the closing admin will be obliged to attach to no weight to Knowledgekid87's !vote, since it is not based on policy or guidelines.

It is also notable that Knowledgekid87 has posted a near-identical boilerplate response to at least half-a-dozen MFD nominations, each of which has had detailed evidence posted well before Knowledgekid87's arrival. Knowledgekid87 doesn't simply ignore the evidence, but goes the next step and dishonestly dismisses it as IDONTLIKEIT. This sort of spammed dishonesty is disruptive conduct. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:07, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep for lots of reasons: meets the breadth-of-subject-area requirement of the WP:POG guideline, the news section (containing information not available in the article) was automatically updated just last month and will continue to update automatically, has an active WikiProject. UnitedStatesian (talk) 18:11, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @UnitedStatesian the breadth of topic and the active Wikiproject have been in place for the last decade while the almost-unused portal has rotted. Why on earth should we expect that the factors which have been present through that neglect will magically become factors to turn this into a maintained and well-read portal?

That just magical thinking. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:46, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – Has sufficient broadness in topical scope, expandable, improvable. Deletion should not always be a first resort. Also keep per several of the rationales presented above, such as having functional news, improving the portal to attract more viewers, "there has also been some activity from various editors", etc. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:56, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – I have updated and expanded the articles for the portal to 20. If the portal is retained, it has great potential to be further expanded, which I will perform if it is. I have added myself as a maintainer for the portal as well (diff). Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:10, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @NA1K, how many portals do you now claim to be a maintainer of?> And how many of those have any other named maintainer(s)? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:05, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment – I have updated and expanded the Selected picture section of the portal, using the newer method of placing the image directly on the portal page. There are now 10 images, including several Featured images at Wikimedia Commons. Obviously, more can be added. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:55, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – Has been further expanded, and now has 40 selected articles, many of which include Featured- and Good-class articles. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:00, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment in response to the call by User:Buaidh and others for a moratorium on the deletion of regional portals: Please discuss this at Village Pump where I have tried to mention the issue of regional portals. I will personally respect any request for a moratorium to allow discussion of the status of regional portals if it is made there via an RFC. (I cannot speak for any other editor.) I will ignore any moratorium request that is not made there. There have been many comments that nations, states of the United States, and other regions should have portals, but, until now, no serious discussion of the guidelines for such portals.

The statement that these portals should be kept so that they can be updated and rebuilt is silly. Most of them use thditor e failed paradigm of partial copies of pages, and if they are rebuilt, should be rebuilt from scratch with dynamite. Besides, if no one is maintaining them, why does it make sense to expect that Godot will upgrade them?

As to whether they do any harm, the answer is that many of them present no-longer-correct information, such as about heads of state who have been replaced either democratically or undemocratically. Obsolete information in portals is worse than in articles, because most editors do not know how to update portal subpages. They are not harmless, and no one is about to fix them.

Any editor who wants to propose that regional portals should have a special status may do so at WP:POG2019RFC.

Robert McClenon (talk) 00:23, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Those consensus building RfCs are on-going, we can only work with that has been decided already in the past. You say tagging and editing does not work, despite evidence to the contrary. What I see is that once a portal with potential gets marked for deletion, then people start looking at the portal and improve it. Just like what we saw in this portal. Maybe try the tagging strategy first before saying it does not work. You say we should delete portals that have not been maintained for a while so they can be recreated again properly. But what I see is that you would just use the past deletion as an argument for re-deletion in the inevitable MfD (probably started by you) that will follow the recreation. Sorry if I do not really see that as a honest proposal. --Hecato (talk) 09:04, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hecato, you continue to miss the point about portals such as this. The problems with them is not the lack of a one-off drive-by update while under scrutiny at MFD. The problem is their long-term history of low readership and abandonment, and you offer no evidence whatsoever that this can be converted to the WP:POG-required "likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

All you offer is assertions, apparently based on your vast experience of 50 days as as a registered editor. To have some credility, you need evidence. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:35, 3 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per the nom and BrownHairedGirl. This portal has been abandoned for a decade and a little burst of maintenance activity by essentially one editor after this MfD started should hold no weight towards being kept. There is a decade of hard evidence that this portal fails WP:POG's requirement that portals be "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. This has never been met in any form and there is no indication this ever will be met. One editor is a blip, not the seismic shift in maintainers this portal would need to be sustainable for the long-term. Portals stand or fall in the now on their merits, not given moratoriums to keep counter-productive junk forever on the chance someday something might get better. Given the near decade of evidence that this is not a suitable topic for a portal, I am strongly against allowing recreation. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:30, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• As I stated above, I am now a maintainer of the portal. If it is retained, I will be periodically updating it with new content. Also, the portal has been significantly expanded compared to its state at the time of deletion. I disagree with the notion of Vietnam being an unsuitable portal topic. Vietnam has a rich cultural history, and it is the 15th most populous country in the world. Furthermore, check out the sandbox page I have created at [►] User:Northamerica1000/sandbox/Vietnam category tree, which demonstrates the extensive depth-of-coverage about the country that exists on Wikipedia. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:35, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:POG, portals need teams of dedicated maintainers to be useful to this encyclopedia, not a few hypothetical edits now and again by one keepist editor. That some find the history and culture of Vietnam interesting is of no consequence to this discussion, which is about policy and evidence, not momentary bouts of WP:ILIKEIT desires. A decade of hard evidence shows this topic is not broad enough, like so many already deleted country portals. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:51, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have already significantly expanded the portal. The edits I have already performed are not hypothetical, they are literal. See the page's Revision history for examples. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:11, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I'm very troubled by what DexDor pointed out at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Threaded_Discussion_(Purpose_of_Portals), that the "selected content" supposedly about "Vietnam" is actually a selection of content about the USA military. This could be useful to surface the content bias in this area, but I think categories are more suitable for that. Nemo 08:20, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• The Recognized content listed in the portal (listed here) consists of WP:FA and WP:GA articles with a topical focus upon Vietnam. Perhaps a solution to deter potential Wikipedia:Systemic bias would be to encourage users to work on other, non-military articles about Vietnam and improve them to FA and GA class. Then the list would be more balanced. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 08:47, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"articles with a topical focus upon Vietnam"?! The Little egret article, for example, doesn't even mention Vietnam. In many others (e.g. 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines) Vietnam is just relevant to part of the topic. Editors will generally edit what they choose to edit. DexDor ^(talk) 06:13, 11 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Note to Closer: There is a maintainer now. And there have been significant improvements to the Portal: I believe all of the original concerns of the MfD opener have been taken care of. If the maintainer requires help in expanding the portal, then I would also offer my assistance. --Hecato (talk) 20:21, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak delete. Wikipedia:WikiProject Vietnam appears to be not very active (e.g. no talk page discussions for several years) so (combined with the analysis above) it appears there's not likely to be regular maintenance. If not deleted then the following should be done - (1) remove the "Things you can do" or replace it by a much smaller section (iirc a portal is supposed to be reader-facing; a link to the wikiproject is sufficient) (2) remove/replace the "Recognized content" as it does not form a good overview/showcase (for readers) of articles about Vietnam (most of the articles listed aren't specifically about Vietnam and some e.g. Little egret don't even mention the country). For editors interested in Vietnam the wikiproject article assessment system (currently 109 at top importance of which 15 are stub class) is a much better way of identifying important Vietnam articles by quality. DexDor ^(talk) 06:21, 11 August 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.