Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bavaria

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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. The rationale to delete this portal is more convincing, particularly the fact that this portal has been abandoned for years, and is currently serving outdated and potentially inaccurate information to readers. I'll move it to WP:WikiProject Germany/Portal:Bavaria as requested. ‑Scottywong | [verbalize] || 01:00, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Bavaria

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected mini-portal on the German state of Bavaria, wih only 5 articles + 5 biogs. Very low readership, and no sign that it has ever had any significant interest from editors other than its creator, or from WikiProjects.

With 13 million inhabitants, Bavaria is Germany's second-most-populous state. However, the last 8 months of scrutinisng portals at MFD has shown that sub-national regions (including cities) rarely attract enough readers and editors to sustain a portal. This is not one of the exceptions.

Notes:
 * 1) Created in 2009 by, who last edited en.wp in 2014
 * 2) I have found no substantive updates or expansion since then.  Just some formatting edits, and and conversion of some sub-pages to transclusion
 * 3) Low readership.  In the 12 months to end October 2019, it got an average of only 11 pageviews/day. The rate is quite steady, apart from a short spike in June 2019.  That's less than half of the same period's median rate  of 28 views/day for all currenty-existing portals.
 * 4) No discussion ever at Portal talk:Bavaria
 * 5) No assessment of quality or importance by WP:WikiProject Portal (see Portal talk:Bavaria)
 * 6) No recent interest from WikiProjects.  WhatLinksHere from WikipediaTalk namespace shows only 3 mentions, all in 2010/2011:
 * 7) * A mention in a 2011 discussion at WT:WikiProject Bavaria, asking if that project was still active, and noting that the portal was not maintained
 * 8) * A mention in a 2010 announcement at WT:WikiProject Germany noting the portal needed maintainers
 * 9) * A passing mention in a 2011 discussion at WT:WikiProject Switzerland
 * 10) The portal is a hybrid of the forked-subpages model and the "mega-navbox" model pioneered by User:Bermicourt. The mega-navbox component is in Portal:Bavaria/Topics, which I suggest would make an excellent basis for a Template:Bavaria navbox. (It is surprising that we don't have one already).  Navboxes are much more successful than portals because they are (or should be) transcluded on each article in their set, allowing readers to navigate directly between articles ... whereas portals have the list on a separate page.

The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Bavaria shows:
 * Portal:Bavaria/Did you know, with only one entry. Unchanged since 2009, apart from tweaks. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section". Eleven-year articles are not in any way "new", so this is just a WP:TRIVIA section.  In any case, I can find no sign of the linked article German nationality law ever having been selected for WP:DYK, so this is just an unscrutinised fake DYK which usurps the good name of DYK.
 * Portal:Bavaria/Selected article with five sub-pages. In 2018, all were converted by User:Dreamy Jazz from content forks to transclusions of excerpts from the article's lead. This was a helpful improvement to prevent rot, but doesn't resolve the smallness of the set
 * Portal:Bavaria/Selected biography with five sub-pages. All are content forks created in 2009, with only minor technical tweaks since then.  None are BLPs.
 * Portal:Bavaria/Quotes, all created in 2009, with no indication of source.

Some other German portals have been moved to project space at the request of their creator User:Bermicourt. In this case, the only part which seems likely to be of use to the project is Portal:Bavaria/Topics, so I suggest moving that page and deleting the rest. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:32, 13 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks?  I have a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.
 * In this case I think that the appropriate replacement link would be to Portal:Germany. Alternative suggestions welcome. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:37, 13 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete or move to project space per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by @ Brown HairedGirl . Low viewed, abandoned micro-portal on a narrow topic. I agree with BHG that the only part of this portal worth possibly moving is Portal:Bavaria/Topics. The rest is just a useless time suck. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:39, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - This should be speedily closed as the nominator is a major subject of an ongoing discussion at ANI regarding portals. Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. BrownHairedGirl faces a potential topic ban from portal related topics based on behavior concerns raised. I am not saying that this MfD can not continue, I am saying it is poor judgment. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 20:50, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * KK87, if and when any topic ban is implemented, I will respect it, as I hope other editors will also respect any bans. But no decision has yet been made.
 * The other party to that discussion is NA1K, for whom a topic ban has also been proposed. Since that ANI discussion opened, NA1K has started three portals MFDs: MFD:Portal:Schleswig-Holstein, MFD:Portal:Geography of Kenya and MFD:Portal:UK waterways. If you want some sort of moratorium pending resolution of the ANI, then you should feel free to propose it, but it seems to me that what you are doing here is to make a partisan prejudgemnet of the outcome. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs)
 * I have struck my comment as I was unaware or had forgotten that these other discussions had been started during the ANI discussion. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:42, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for striking it, @Knowledgekid87.  I hope that you have also struck your compliant at ANI.
 * In future, it would be helpful if before posting something like that, you would actually check such factors, or simply ask me on my talk page. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:29, 14 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as per User:BrownHairedGirl or Move to Project Space.
 * The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore 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.  (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.)  Common sense 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 selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (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 maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies).  Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable.  Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
 * Regardless of whether the portal is deleted or moved, the backlinks can go to Portal:Germany.
 * Sub-national portals have normally not had enough viewing to warrant retention, and neither does this one. It also isn't maintained.  Robert McClenon (talk) 03:13, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: I don't agree that a navigational template is better than a portal. The navigational templates are largely unused too, but they're worse in that they also make pages heavier. Personally I care about WP:NPOV and unbiased selection above everything else. I would be fine with this portal if didn't have all those selected article/image/biography, news, quotes and DYK sections, which are at best underdeveloped: I've not yet inspected them for selection issues, but when I do I suspect I'll lean for delete. Nemo 17:22, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: - Does it make sense to redirect this to Portal:Germany or to make the content a subsection of Germany? I think your explanation for why this portal isn't needed does hold water, and I am wondering from a technical standpoint whether these sorts of subnational portals (cities, states, provinces) would be best made into a section of their nation rather than being made standalone artifacts. I like the idea of having topical mainspaces like this but after looking through some of the other portals I definitely understand your rationale for why this type of portal does not make sense. Omanlured (talk) 18:42, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Another possible idea -- could some of these links be reworked into a Template? It won't be as robust as this portal page but it could allow for centralized repository of page information related to Bavaria that would approximate some of the benefits of this portal. Omanlured (talk) 18:45, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * @Omanlured using some of this to make a navbox is a suggestion which I made in the nomination, at item #7.
 * I have no idea what you mean by as robust as this portal page. Robustness is one of the very last qualities which I would attribute to a poorly maintained, almost unused Rube Goldberg machine such as this.  "Rusting junk" would be a better description for it.
 * If editors want to develop Portal:Germany, then the place to discuss that would be at Portal talk:Germany. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:02, 15 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. Bavaria is bigger than many countries and is easily broad enough for a portal. What it needs is more mainspace links; currently it's mostly linked from talk pages which themselves will have low page views. Better linking will raise the page views (but bear in mind portals are not articles, so should have a lower threshold like categories) and make it a useful mega-navbox. However, If we're not willing to make portals work for us in the way they were intended then as a second best I would move it to project space where it can continue to be used to develop the topic. Bermicourt (talk) 21:29, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bermicourt offers no rationale for "keep" part of that !vote. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:02, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see much point in wasting my time repeating the case for keeping portals to editors who know the arguments well but simply disagree and frankly outnumber those who believe they have a valid future (which is not the same as their past). I've added some rationale. Regardless of the arguments either way, I have no confidence that portals will survive in any meaningful numbers in the wake of this mass deletion campaign. But at least in project space they have a valid use without upsetting those who think they must compete with articles to survive. Bermicourt (talk) 10:10, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Bermicourt, WP:NOTAVOTE. If you don't take the time to explain a reason, the closer is obliged to attach no weight to your recommendation. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:21, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Since virtually no portals are surviving the current MfD campaign; my 2nd choice preference if there is no appetite to "keep" is to move to project space since there is value in using them for project work and they don't affect mainspace. Bermicourt (talk) 20:16, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
 * And because we have absolutely no criteria for what constitutes valid topics for portals, these just get decided on WP:ILIKEIT/WP:IDONTLIKEIT lines anyways, i.e. majority votes. SportingFlyer  T · C  14:25, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete states don't need a portal period.Catfurball (talk) 16:22, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep We don't delete articles in mainspace based on page views and we shouldn't use them as a guide to delete portals. The topic has its own associated WikiProject and many possible featured topics, which I have proposed would be the guideline we use to determine whether topics are notable. SportingFlyer  T · C  12:15, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. Portals are not articles, they are tools. AfD-type argeuments don't apply to portals (hence the block on portal-spamming post TTH's work in 2016).  At a WP:COMMONSENSE level, most of the MfDs around portals revolve around (1) is the tool being maintained/supported, and (2) is the tool being used.  A tool that is neither maintained or supported, or used by readers, is unlikely to have a future on WP (unlike a stub-article, which can stay forever, as long as it is notable). Britishfinance (talk) 15:14, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * @SportingFlyer, as BF notes, portals are tools not articles.
 * The proposed reliance on a WikiProject as a criterion misses the fact that this WikiProject has shown no interest in the portal. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:58, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The problem with these MfDs is that I'm making a WP:COMMONSENSE argument - this portal doesn't require much maintenance to be useful, and it can easily be useful, so why should we delete it now, especially while we're in the process for establishing guidelines for portals? The difficulty here is largely that there are two competing WP:COMMONSENSE arguments, but the delete !voters at these MfDs frequently out-vote the keep !voters, meaning we're keeping and deleting portals in a piecemeal fashion at this point. SportingFlyer  T · C  00:32, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * With respect, SF, you are not making a WP:COMMONSENSE argument. You are cherrypicking the facts to suit your argument.
 * For example, you are applying article criteria to a page which is a tool not an article; ignoring the fact that it's an almost unused tool; and asserting that little maintenance is needed, while ignoring the evidence above that even the little needed has not been done.
 * And you don't explain where you see the WP:COMMONSENSE in justifying the existence of a portal by the existence of a project which has no interest in the portal.
 * In any case, the project is at best inactive. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Bavaria, posted in 2011.  I have just tagged the project as inactive, because it meets the criteria in Template:WikiProject status, viz "no discussions on its talk page for four months". The last actual discussion, where one editor replied to another, was that 2011 question at WT:WikiProject_Bavaria ... where there was a reply saying "I think the project is dead as such". --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:07, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I could also accuse you of cherrypicking the facts to pick your argument. The topic is broad enough for a portal and just requires a maintainer. If no one wishes to maintain it, I don't really have an issue with its deletion, but again, there are currently no guidelines on whether to keep or delete a portal. I have also requested that you stop responding to my posts, and you have chosen not to do so. SportingFlyer  T · C  01:10, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * SF, broad enough for a portal is matter of judgement, not of fact. We don't have any guidance on how to apply that judgement, but we do have many precedents which put Bavaria in a grey zone.
 * Similarly, just requires a maintainer is your personal view; it is not a point of fact. there is considerable support for requiring multiple maintainers, to avoid the key man abandonment which has left so many hundreds of portals to rot.
 * You are free to withdraw from a discussion if you want to. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:38, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * There's nothing you've presented here that's not your personal view either. You may claim you're just presenting facts and the facts justify deletion, but the conclusion you're drawing is your own personal view as well. Now, will you please stop responding to me as I've asked you to do multiple times? SportingFlyer  T · C  01:41, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * , you may have seen in my comment to ArbCom, I highlighted that point as being one of the core differences at the heart of portal MfDs. Maybe they will opine/force the community to opine on it (and I drew out the implications of each outcome). thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 11:38, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * In further follow-up to your point re amount of Deletes verus Keeps at portal MfDs, I find that where there are problems with whether the topic is suitable AND there are no dedicated maintainers (in all almost all cases I have seen at MfD, the readership of the portal is tiny), very few Keeps appear and the portal normally gets Deleted. However, where the topic is a valid and material one for a portal, but there are still no real maintainers, then there is a more even balance of Keeps vs. Deletes (in fact, I would say slightly more Keeps on average), however, some of the Keep arguements can be very brief (e.g. SOFIXIT), and they don't often challenge the Deletes but tend to ignore them, IMHO. Britishfinance (talk) 12:10, 21 November 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.