Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:1940s

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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:  delete. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 02:32, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:1940s

 * – (View MfD)

Mini-portal with a total of only ten articles. Vastly inferior to the comprehensive and well-maintained head article 1940s.

The portal was created in September 2016‎ with only selected article and one biog. More were added in 2017, bring to the tally to 5 articles plus 5 biogs. That total of ten is only half the risibly low minimum of twenty set in the former guideline WP:POG. The selection is also grossly unbalanced: all 5 topics listed in Portal:1940s/Selected article are military, and 3 of the 5 are predominantly about the United States.

That's abysmal. We are luring readers to what purports to be a portal on the 1940s, but which offers only a miniscule selection of topics which present a hideously unbalanced picture of the decade.

No doubt one of the portals fans will be along in a minute to claim that more articles could be added. Indeed they could, in theory ... but in practice, we can see that after three years, nobody has done so. Yet again, there is clear evidence that nobody wants to maintain this portal, and another re-run of the hasty-additions-to-try-to-stave-off-deletion won't solve the problem of lack of ongoing maintenance.

In any case this portal is entirely un-needed. The head article 1940s is a well-maintained list-style article, with links to 864 articles. That's 86 times as many as the pseudo-portal. Better still, the selection of links is all displayed in front of the reader, instead of the portal's absurd mechanism of hiding the list and requiring the reader to perform the absurdly counter-intuitive task of purging the page to see just one more random item. (If there was a competition for user-hostile design, that model would be a strong candidate for outright winner).

This abysmal, neglected pseudo-portal is a waste of readers' time and insult to their intelligence. They will rapidly spot the uselessness of this page and go the article 1940s. The 'pedia should be directing them to the massively better head article rather than luring them to this folly.

Luckily, not many readers waste their time on this pseudo-portal. Despite 6,923 links to this portal from articles and categories, in January–June 2019 the portal averaged only 22	 views per day, while the head article averaged 394 views per day.

But that's still a total of 3,905 readers in the first half of 2019 whose time was wasted. Time to just delete this pointless page. The head article does the job vastly better. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:04, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Note on backlinks. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if this discussion is closed as delete, I propose that the backlinks should be removed.  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries, but in this case I see no suitable alternative.
 * 6,835 of the backlinks (out of a total of 6,923) are from categories, nearly all of them generated by Module:FindYDCportal. Removing one line from that module will turn off those links. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:08, 2 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as per analysis per User:BrownHairedGirl. This is not a well-viewed portal, and has not been maintained.  The articles are really all about the main conflict of the decade, which was perhaps the greatest conflict in history, which was World War II, and we also have a Portal:World War II, which has much better viewing and more articles, and is associated with WP:WikiProject Military History.
 * The following table compares the decade portal with the military portal, and shows that the decade portal is a poor substitute.
 * User:BrownHairedGirl - Please consider changing the backlinks to Portal:World War II.
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should 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.  This 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 articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (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 maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained.  Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.  Robert McClenon (talk) 02:10, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Robert McClenon: I oppose changing the backlinks to Portal:World War II.  The backlinks were created in the expectation that this would be as labelled, a portal about the 1940s. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:17, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * User:BrownHairedGirl - I don't really care much about the backlinks anyway. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:52, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

1940s

 * Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this condition. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, being for navigation instead, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated and useless portals to articles and say they should just be fixed. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and maintenance will ever materialize anyway. The downgrading of POG cuts both ways - there is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. Content forks are worthless and should not be saved. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:13, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as duplicate and per WP:UNDUE. Nemo 05:56, 3 October 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.