Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Asian Americans

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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. — xaosflux  Talk 15:45, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Asian Americans


Automated portal built off a single navbox. Previously an abandoned, broken and probably-never-working old-style manual portal.

This was converted to automated format on 23 September 2018‎ by @The Transhumanist (TTH). The automated version then, as in the current version, draws its "Selected general articles" list solely from the navbox Template:Asian Americans, of which it is therefore a redundant fork. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).

The manual portal was created in 2011 by @WhisperToMe. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Asian Americans shows a large set of subpages arranged in three sets: 40 Selected pictures, 20 Selected articles, and 26 Selected biographies. That sounds like a decent collection, but as far as I can the portal never worked.

I have examined most pre-automation variants of the portal. The last variant before TTH and @Dreamy Jazz began tweaking it in 2018 is this from 2015, with 4 redlinked actions and a "topics list" section which consists solely of the navbox Template:Asian Americans. I have checked to see if the redlinked pages ever existed, but I can find no trace of them.

After months of tweaks, the last pre-automation version, dated 12 August 2018, is also full of redlinks.

The existing set of subpages is commendably big, but as far as I can see from sample checking, all the pages are unchanged since their creation in 2011 by WhisperToMe. Later in 2011, they were categorised in Category:Asian American portal, which was speedily-renamed in 2013 to Category:Asian Americans portal ... and that seems to be it. WhisperToMe obviously worked hard to create this portal, but the ongoing maintenance never happened. (Just for clarity, I don't suggest any criticism of WhisperToMe. All editors are volunteers who are entitled to use their energies as they wish, including moving on from work which they started. See WP:NOTCOMPULSORY)

So what we have here is a choice of
 * 1) a broken (and apparently never-completed) manual portal based on 8-year-old content forks of Wikipedia articles which are likely to have been significantly developed in that time
 * 2) an automated portal of a type which has been overwhelming rejected by consensus of a an exceptionally high turnout at two WP:CENT-advertised discussions.

WP:POG says that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". I haven't checked closely, but this is probably a broad enough topic both in theme and in available content ... but after 8 years it clearly has not attracted even fixers, let alone maintainers. Meanwhile the B-class head article Asian Americans offers an excellent overview of the topic, and the navbox Template:Asian Americans gives good navigation.

So I think that any expectation of maintainers appearing any time soon would be a triumph of hope over the evidence of 8 years neglect. But miracles can sometimes happen, so I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT without prejudice to recreating a curated portal which is not a fork of another page, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:18, 6 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Strong keep and restore hand-curated format. The stats the nominator lists show that the portal clearly meets the guidelines. It would be relatively trivial to remove the redlinks. As to whether lack of updates to the excerpts requires immediate deletion, this appears to be a much broader issue than this one portal, and covered by the consensus from last year's RfC that portals should be retained. It seems to me that the nominator needs to show that there are clear & pressing concerns with sufficient of the 2011 excerpts that deletion is the only reasonable option. I have checked all of the 26 bios, and found only two pressing issues, which I have fixed. I have also, for safety, switched all the bios of living people to excerpt from the article lead. Espresso Addict (talk) 15:29, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Espresso Addict, as you know, last year's decision at WP:ENDPORTALS was just a decision not to delete all portals. It did not equate to a decision to restore a farm of 11-year-old abandoned content forks. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:08, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * At the date of the end of the RfC this was still in multi-subpage mode. The automated transclusion methods didn't even exist during much of the RfC debate; transclude lead excerpt was first announced on 27 April and transclude random excerpt on 4 May. This portal was only restarted in September 2018. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:10, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The RFC was simply a decision not to delete everything. Nothing in it requires either keeping or deleting any type of portal. It left all those questions unanswered.
 * So we still need to ask: why keep 11-yo content forks? -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:17, 8 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Question - Is User:Espresso Addict offering to maintain the portal? (By the way, there is no such thing as a strong keep.  We just kept an essay that states that.  Somneone will say it is only an essay.)  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:47, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Strong comment - The "manual" version was nuked, for a reason. And nobody said anything against, for a reason. This was quite a year ago. The replacement was nothing more than nuking: a simple fork of a navbox. In this present state, this portal roughly says that Asian Americans are coming from an Asian country or from another. This is absolutely true, but not that useful. The Catholic Church in the United States is presented as a part of Asian Americans. There is no reference to backup such a great discovery, but entertaining the reader is a goal of the portals, isn't it ? Someone has !voted strong restore, but not restored anything. Probably for a reason: having a set of 26 people would need to explain why these 26, rather some other people. For example, Tessa Ludwick (born 1988), Korean American actress from Apollo Beach, Florida was described at Portal:Korea as one of the 7 topmost Korean people ever. And is not even named here. But who cares ? With an average page views per day = 10... Pldx1 (talk) 15:01, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - The portal has 11 daily page views. By contrast, the head article has 716 daily page views.  The choice is between an automated portal and a heritage portal that has known errors.  It is true that known errors can be fixed, but any IT engineer knows that the known errors are not the same as the total errors.  (There are various techniques for estimating the number of remaining errors that are too advanced to be worth using.)  A fully debugged portal that has 11 daily page views is only a fully debugged portal with 11 daily page views.  Robert McClenon (talk) 03:05, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Does not meet the breadth-of-subject-area requirement of the WP:POG guideline. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:08, 3 June 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.