Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Pointless supra-continental portals

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 * 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: speedy deleted WP:G7 by Db-author request of the creator, User:Buaidh. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:31, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Pointless supra-continental portals


A set of pointless, redundant supra-continental portals, all created today. I spotted when checking at Related changes for Category:All portals. They turn out to have all been created by one editor: User:Buaidh, who has created a few other portals today which I will nominate separately.

We already have a severe shortage of maintainers for nearly all existing geographic portals, most of which also have very low pageviews. There is no reason to believe that creating a pointless extra layer of portals will suddenly make a bunch of maintainers and readers magically appear out of nowhere.

Consider for example the first two of these new portals: Portal:Afro-Eurasia‎ and Portal:Eurasia‎. Together, they precisely duplicate the scope of three existing portals: Portal:Europe, Portal:Africa, and Portal:Asia. Those three portals are poorly maintained, and in January–July 2019 they averaged only |Portal:Asia|Portal:Europe 206 pageviews per day for all three portals, compared with a total of |Asia|Europe 22,250 daily views for the head articles.

Similarly, Portal:Americas‎ duplicates the scope of the existing Portal:South America and Portal:North America, which |Portal:North_America between them get a total of only 50 daily pageviews.

Portal:Australasia‎ duplicates the scope of the existing Portal:Australia and Portal:New Zealand. No useful purpose is served by such duplication.

Each of these portals has been created using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}. This a template devised by the notorious portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH), who used it to personally spam out thousands of automated pseudo-portals, some of them just for the heck of it.

Those automated portals create a selected article list based on a navbox, of which they therefore become simply pointless duplicates. Most of the navbox-clone portalspam was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two), and the rest in smaller groups. All but one or two of the ~4200 portals created in this way have been deleted, so this type of portal is clearly deprecated.

All 4 portals are currently tagged as under construction, which may possibly indicate an intention to covert them to a different format. However, even if the automated spam format is temporary, the more fundamental problem remains: these portals are pointless duplicates. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:14, 28 July 2019‎  (UTC)
 * Please keep: I would ask that you to bear with us and see what we can create.  Then you can delete to your heart's content.


 * Americas is the preferred term for the combined continent, especially by the residents of Latin America which extends through both North America and South America. Australasia is the preferred term for the partially submerged continent that includes Australia and New Zealand.  Eurasia is the preferred term for the continental mass of Europe and Asia.  The ancient peoples of the Mediterranean basin divided the world into Africa, Asia, and Europe, but the division of Asia and Europe is now completely arbitrary.  Afro-Eurasia is a supracontinent, but it is preferred by islamic sources.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 22:50, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * @Buaidh, what you describe is known as a WP:POVFORK.
 * Deletion now will avoid any more time being wasted on these POVFORKs. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:02, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see WP:POVFORK. That is merely how I describe the desirability of the portals.  I think you're grasping for straws.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 23:35, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The only straw-grasping is your decision to describe the desirability of creating these pointless duplicates in terms which amount to WP:POVFORK. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:46, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * PS @Buaidh  says bear with us and see what we can create.  (underlining added by BHG).
 * So far as I can see, the "us" and we" are a royal we, an affectation added by Buaidh to disguise the fact that this is a solo portal-creation spree.
 * I see no evidence of any collaborative effort behind these portal creations. No WikiProject notifications, no discussions, nothing to indicate that these portals are anything other a one-person venture which will, like hundreds and hundreds of other abandoned one-person portals, rot when the creator's attentions move on elsewhere. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:40, 29 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete all Seven portals in seven minutes, using the dreaded Basic Portal Startpage portalspam template, means these run directly counter to the community-wide consensus established at Village pump (proposals)/Archive 157. I informed User:Buaidh of same on his talkpage, hoping for subsequent G7s that would save us from this, but no luck. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:50, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * 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.