Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Andes

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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. — xaosflux  Talk 19:43, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Andes

 * – (View MfD)

Redundant portal, we already have Portal:Mountains. Cambalachero (talk) 17:40, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Another duplicative portal by a member of the portal platoon. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:45, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Portalspam. John M Wolfson (talk) 19:24, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. No valid deletion rationale is presented. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:22, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Further comment. This is clearly a viable broad topic. I disagree that it is worth deleting to re-create a better selection; it is much easier to improve it in situ, and the existing portal is far from bad enough to require immediate deletion. It's easy, with the framework in place, to create other boxes and distribute articles between them, and I'd encourage the creator to do so. If deleted as a result of this process, then I don't think the refund policy would apply; we'd probably need a time-wasting deletion review. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:00, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. I could be persuaded to go with "delete" if better rationale is presented, but the reasons given above - we have another portal, it's a duplicative portal by the portal platoon, portalspam - are just drive-by comments that make a mockery of the deletion process. Bermicourt (talk) 09:37, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Being a subtopic isn't a reason for deletion: Portal:Chemistry and Portal:Science are both clearly worth keeping. Having been created "by a member of the portal platoon" isn't a reason either.  The portal shows no obvious errors and, with 155 hand-picked articles, its scope is broad enough.  Certes (talk) 09:42, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Obvious keep. Per the arguments above, and: just like Portal:Himalayas and the excellent Portal:Alps, this subject is more than broad enough (geographically, but also culturally and biologically), without any risk of it justifying a faulty "all mountain ranges must have a portal" argument. UnitedStatesian (talk) 10:53, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep it isn't a redundant portal, rather it's a large subtopic of a large parent topic. I think the scope is wide enough for a portal and it wasn't created by a script.  Hut 8.5  11:55, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep as creator - this portal has vast scope in its own right and has none of the problems of the other, automated portals. There is very little here from the nominator or others to even convince me to let it go as I have others. Gazamp (talk) 14:47, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Strong delete. I started out by writing "keep". The nominator is wrong: Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range, and it contains many of the highest peaks outside Asia. There are over 170 articles in Category:Mountains of the Andes‎+subcats, and many hundreds more articles on the ecology of the area, and hundreds more again on the human geogrpahy of the Andes.  So the scope is plenty broad enough.
 * The portal uses a curated articles list, rather than being a fork of a navbox, so it's not a WP:REDUNDANTFORK. !Votes to delete on that basis are simply wrong.
 * So the portal as it stands is no a breach of the two main principles on which navboxes have been deleted in recent week. That's why I was going to say "keep".
 * But frankly, it's still a useless piece of junk. It's a long list of articles related to assorted aspects of the Andes, passed through a piece of software which takes a random subset and displays one at a time the first two paras of the lede, and a picture.  There's no attempt to group and sub-group the many topics, no list of those major topics, let alone a comprehensive index of key topics like can be found at e.g. Portal:Harz Mountains. It's just a lucky dip which does zero to assist navigation and in no way meets the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects".
 * The creator @Gazamp is a lovely person, and very committed to en.wp. Dozens of their other portal creations have been speedy deleted because Gazamp graciously accepted that being based on single navboxes, they were all WP:REDUNDANTFORKs.  (If only more portal creators had been so helpful!)  But the fact this one passes the two  tests which so many other portals fail doesn't mean that it comes anywhere near satisfying the WP:PORTAL principle that it add value beyond the main page.  It is still no use at all to our readers, and it fails WP:PORTAL. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:17, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Thank you for engaging once again - can I assume by your comments that you would not be prejudiced against the recreation of Portal:Andes if were modelled on Portal:Harz Mountains instead of the automatic portal script? If so, would moving to the Draft or User namespace be permissible? That way, the articles I've already put in would remain so while I (learn how to) reformat the portal.
 * Any other suggestions are always welcome, Gazamp (talk) 17:20, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * BHG is at least prepared to argue the case rationally and I accept her logic. So I'm going to change my vote to delete but permit recreation if it addresses BHG's points. The subject is clearly broad enough - but the portal needs to be worth using either for readers looking for relevant articles or for project editors improving coverage or, ideally, both. Bermicourt (talk) 18:48, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks again, @Gazamp, both for your continued constructiveness and for yet again demonstrating great civility in an uncomfortable situation.
 * The head article Andes is a Level-3 Vital article, and clearly has huge scope. If we are going to both keep portals and not have a mass cull down to ~100 topics, then Andes should certainly be on the list.  So I'd support re-creating a Portal:Andes if it really did add value.
 * There are several ways of achieving that, e.g.
 * Drawing on the "list key articles in selected areas" model of Portal:Harz Mountains, which offers a great starting point for navigation
 * Having multiple s
 * Listing FAs and GAs
 * There are obviously more possibilities, but that's a start. And those ideas are not mutually exclusive.
 * If a WP:REFUND helped, then of course, that's always available. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:02, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I didn't think WP:REFUND was available after a broad participation XfD discussion like this one; am I mistaken? UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:10, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * As a regular at REFUND, requests to restore the pages deleted through XfD are routinely rejected and referred to the closing admin or WP:DRV, because a single admin can't unilaterally overturn the result of a deletion discussion. At best they are restored to draft space. I think this argument is getting dangerously close to arguing that deletion is cleanup. Sure, it would be nice to have a longer list of pages to look at in the vein of Portal:Harz Mountains, but not having that isn't a reason to delete what's there. Especially not if someone is willing to work on it.  Hut 8.5  19:20, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I'm a v rare visitor to WP:REFUND, and it seems to be more narrowly cast than I remembered. In any case, the only unique part of it is the list of articles, which I have just posted on the talk page at List of selected articles.
 * But this isn't an article-space deletion as cleanup discussion. It's about part of the huge set of non-content pages which are have either been create without due care, or have been abandoned for years. The portals fan club has been insisting on individual triaging, so that what's been happening for weeks, with basically 3 outcomes: 1/ nuke 'cos it's too narrow; 2/ keep 'cos it's worth improving; 3/ WP:TNT because while the topic may be suitable, there;s nothing worth keeping. This is a TNT nomination, as @Auric noted, and which I should have explicitly said in my nomination. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:25, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * To use your taxonomy, I think the type 3/, TNT nominations are becoming problematic, now that TTH's creations (msot of which also were type 1/) have been largely deleted. Why the rush?  I now have 3 very broad subject area portals that I have to try to improve to the point where their MfD might be closed as keep, with the seven-day clock ticking on all 3, with that number likely to grow, and with my trying to work in parallel on not-yet-MfD'd portals that I expect will come here quickly if not improved.  It is much harder to create a good portal from scratch than to improve a substandard portal that has already been created. I am familiar with WP:MERCY, but will a pause on Type 3/'s at this point do any great damage to the encyclopedia? UnitedStatesian (talk) 22:57, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * @UnitedStatesian, I think your reply unintentionally illustrates the danger very well.
 * Portals which have been abandoned for years and basically junk are being MFDed. Some editors are trying to keep them by a flurry of activity to improve them just enough to take them over the line for now.  But your flurry and that of a few others cannot be sustained across the very wide set of portals needing manual maintenance. So unless there is some long-term maintenance plan in place for each of them, they will just begin a new cycle of decay.  Your sincere efforts to apply a last-minute lick-of-paint will be only a blip on the long-term problem.
 * This isn't some sort of novel or partisan analysis by me. It's the analysis which drove TTH's automation frenzy in the first place: that the overwhelming bulk of high-maintenance portals get low or no maintenance.   TTH's solution was automation, which turned out to be crap.  But now that his new-made spam is all but gone, it seems to me that the revert-to-manual drive on the rest is simply restoring the very crisis which TTH tried to resolve.
 * As of this minute, there are 1,582 portals. Currently open MFDs will probably leave us with about 1300–1400 portals.  I guess that  maybe another 100 will be deleted through new nominations.  So I estimate we'll finish this phase with about 1300–1350 portals, which is only about 15% less than before TTH began work.
 * Where's the extra capacity gonna come from to maintain them? The last few months of outsiders pushing portal cleanup against resistance from portal fans has identified portals as a drama field of marginal utility with pitifully low pageviews, no broad consensus of their future, held in limbo between the ENDPORTALS consensus not to just zap the lot, and the lack of any stable consensus on what they are for, what they should look like, what topics are suitable, and how they should be built.  That's not the sort of territory new maintainers will want to sign up for ... so the decay will not only continue, but gather pace. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:06, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
 * You didn't answer my question of what damage a pause would do, but oh well. Danger?? What's the danger? Let's keep it in perspective: no one even noticed this was going on until I pointed it out.  I disagree with you, on your other two points: I think we are more likely headed to the 300-500 range in short order (even without Legacypac), and I don't have a problem with that whatsoever.  With that much smaller number, it is much more feasible to imagine the current maintainers being able to keep them at acceptable quality (User:Bermicourt is apparently able single-handedly to keep 31 portals at a very high level of quality).  But why throw out the baby with the bathwater? Essentially you have a self-fulfilling prophecy: by creating more work for portal maintainers, you guarantee they will not be able to do the work that is required. UnitedStatesian (talk) 00:19, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
 * @UnitedStatesian, I thought I answered it v clearly. But I will try rephrasing it.
 * The damage a pause would do is to allow a few fans to do just enough tweaking to some of the worst pages to avoid immediate deletion, so that the cull would stop and we'd still be left with a huge number of high-maintenance portals with squillions of neglected content-fork subpages, and still no plan for monitoring, triaging or regular maintenenance.
 * I am trying to create less work for portal maiantainers, but culling the neglected junk and freeing them to concentrate their energies on the portals which are worth saving. I hadn't thought that this phase would leave is with anywhere near as low a number as the 300-500 range you suggest; I'd thought about 1200 was more likely.  But he fewer portals, the less the burden.
 * And you did the community a great service by raising this at VPP in February. But you weren't the first to notice i; I had raised it in September at MFD and at the portals project.
 * And I'm also a great fan of @Bermicourt's work, because his navigation map-style portals are a) vastly more useful than the baroque magazine-style portals, and b) vastly easier to maintain than the forest-of-content-forked-subpages. The more portals that adopt that style, the more  that can be maintained. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:55, 28 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. Clearly a broad enough topic for a portal. Deletion is about whether something should exist, not about the quality/content of what's there (unless it's blatant spam/vandalism obviously). Content issues are not a valid rationale, they're a reason to fix it. The deletion policy is very clear: "If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page." WaggersTALK  09:21, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * that is a simple but very basic misapplication of WP:ATD, because portals are not content. They are simply tools to showcase content and help navigate it, and there is no greater policy reason to retain a malformed portal than to retain a malformed navbox. Deleting this portal as it exists now will remove precisely zero content.
 * There is nothing in policy that requires the retention of a navigational device which doesn't fulfil its purpose. See e.g. WP:TFD, where plenty of useless navboxes are deleted every day.
 * If the current portal was deleted, it could be recreated in literally two edits, one a subst, and the other a copy-paste. There is no need to continue toporesent to read a  page called a portal which does not fulfil the function of a portal, as set out at WP:PORTAL, which says "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects".  This is not not enhanced.
 * See WP:DEL-REASON #13: "Any other use of the article, template, project, or user namespace that is contrary to the established separate policy for that namespace".
 * Note also that WP:DEL-REASON begins "Reasons for deletion include, but are not limited to, the following" . So the policy is not exhaustive.
 * These attempts to wikilawyer the retention of useless portals do not service to readers. If they succeed, they will simply fuel the case for another WP:ENDPORTALS-style proposal to have a massive cull of the junk that the wikilawyers want to keep in the hope that it will some day be turned into something useful. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:11, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Quoting paragraphs of policy followed by an unfounded accusation of wikilawyering is a bit rich. Please assume good faith and be civil. I stand by my interpretation of WP:ATD - it doesn't exclude navigation tools or other "non content" pages from the principle editing being preferable to deleting.
 * The point about deletion the listed deletion criteria is a valid one which I accept; these discussions would not be needed if the policy was clear cut and left no room for interpretation. I also accept that the portal could be recreated quickly if required.
 * This is a portal, in portal space - so I don't understand why the reason concerning "use of the article, template, project, or user namespace" is being quoted here. W<b style="color:#97E">a</b><b style="color:#86D">g</b><b style="color:#75C">ge</b><b style="color:#83C">r</b><b  style="color:#728">s</b><small  style="color:#080">TALK  11:44, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * , you were the one who chose to venture off down the policy wormhole, and your simplistic one-liner took a little space to rebut. I'd prefer to set that all aside.
 * So, why exactly do you want to retain this useless page which could be easily recreated if someone wanted to build a meaningful portal? -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:06, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * For the simple reason that MfD is primarily about whether a page should exist, not about the content that is on it. <b style="color:#98F">W</b><b style="color:#97E">a</b><b style="color:#86D">g</b><b style="color:#75C">ge</b><b style="color:#83C">r</b><b  style="color:#728">s</b><small  style="color:#080">TALK  21:57, 2 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Redirect. I'm under no illusions that anyone will maintain this, but it could possibly be a plausible search term. I see redirecting this as an adequate enough compromise here. I could be wrong, and it is the solution that everyone hates equally. &#8211; MJL &thinsp;‐Talk‐☖ 06:51, 3 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.