Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Buddhism

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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. Just because WP:POG lost its guideline status doesn't mean that all portals will now be kept automatically no matter what. There is clear consensus in the discussion below to delete. ‑Scottywong | [talk] || 22:34, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Buddhism

 * – (View MfD)

Eleven selected articles c. March 2009. Selected article/1, Selected article/2, and Selected article/3 are really from August 2005, and August / May 2008 respectively. All 14 selected bios are from January / March 2009.
 * Errors
 * Phil Jackson may be a Buddhist, but this is not mentioned explicitly in his article or the portal excerpt.
 * Tina Turner retired in 2009. The portal excerpt does not explain her connection to Buddhism.
 * Foguang Temple was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2009.
 * Mazie Keiko Hirono has been a senator since 2013. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 19:55, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for over a decade. The portal clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had a decade of no maintainers and it had a low 51 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (despite the head article Buddhism having 7,928 views per day in the same period). This is a significant long-term decline from 80 views per day from July 1 to Dec. 30 2015.
 * POG also states portals should be associated with a wikiproject, but while WikiProject Buddhism is active, the portal is not featured prominently on the main page, and was last mentioned on the talk page in July 2011, when it got caught up in a dispute about L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) being featured on the portal and listed as part of the Buddhism WikiProject. No one from the project participated in the deletion discussion for Portal:Tibetan Buddhism after being notified. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Buddhism is not a broad enough topic to attract readers and maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 20:35, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * L. Ron Hubbard, noted Buddhist. Lol. Couldn't find and selected bio subpages about Hubbard, but Early life of L. Ron Hubbard is listed in the GAs. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 20:49, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, there was never a bio, just this, which was a listing just like you found still on the portal. This is all the more reason this portal should be deleted. Portal space doesn't need to get caught up in any controversies surrounding the Church of Scientology. Newshunter12 (talk) 21:04, 15 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - In the first half of 2019, the portal had an average of 51 daily pageviews, and the article had an average of 7928 daily pageviews. Discrepancies in the articles illustrate an inherent weakness of content-forked subpages.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:45, 15 September 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 an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Religion), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 10:04, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: I think that this inactive portal only points to a much bigger problem, that is, Buddhism is seriously underrepresented on Wikipedia, compared to other religions and philosophies. There just appear to be too little English-speaking Buddhists around. Just compare the article about the Buddha with those of other founders of religion, and you can see the quality is much different. Furthermore, the WikiProject Buddhism has been all but dead for a long time.-- Farang Rak Tham   (Talk) 11:54, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Buddhism

 * Weak Delete as a well-viewed but unmaintained portal with reasonably broad coverage without prejudice against re-creation with a maintenance plan (involving at least two maintainers) and a design that does not involve content-forked subpages. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:07, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - The errors noted by the nominator are an inherent problem with content-forked subpages and are a reason why a better design is in order. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:31, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep Over 50 daily pageviews and Buddhism is obviously a very broad important topic as one of the four major religions. If this gets deleted then it should be allowed to be recreated with an overhauled version. The problems raised by the MfD starter can be fixed in a few minutes, as has been demonstrated quite a few times now. --Hecato (talk) 09:48, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - No, the idea, stated by User:Hecato, that the problems identified in this MFD can be fixed in a few minutes is nonsense. Two problems have been identified.  Neither of them is a matter of simple factual discrepancies. where one can foolishly think that one has fixed the problem by fixing the error like waving a dead rat.  The first problem is the use of content-forked subpages.  Redesigning the portal to use an embedded list may be done in less than an hour, but not in a few minutes.  The second problem is the lack of maintenance.  A maintenance plan is a document, preferably peer-reviewed, that takes a few hours to write, after the maintainers have been identified, and identifying the maintainers will take at least a few days to allow them to respond to the call for volunteers.  Of course, past experience is that we can wait for a long time, like waiting for Godot, but I am referring to the best case, in which case they respond within a few days.  It doesn't take a few minutes.  That statement is silly.  Robert McClenon (talk) 00:25, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I do not really want to get into an argument here since the outcome of this MfD seems already decided. But I want to at least mention for the record that "A maintenance plan is a document, preferably peer-reviewed, that takes a few hours to write, after the maintainers have been identified, and identifying the maintainers will take at least a few days to allow them to respond to the call for volunteers." are just User:Robert McClenon's personal demands and not based on any guideline or consensus. --Hecato (talk) 08:16, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Even if there isn't a maintenance plan document, which, as User:Hecato notes, isn't in the portal guidelines, the statement that correcting the errors will take a few minutes is nonsense. Redesigning the portal will still take approximately half an hour.  Identifying a maintainer will still take at least a day.  There is a method that an enthusiastic unethical maintainer could use to identify a maintainer much more quickly, but it is forbidden.  The idea that the problems can be fixed in a few minutes is absurd, and indicates that the advocates of portals write first and either think afterward or don't bother to think.  Robert McClenon (talk) 15:06, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * So your argument is really that it does not take "a few minutes" to fix, but instead "half an hour"? You are right, half an hour is truly an extraordinary length of time, completely outside of the realm of "a few minutes". I guess I should have called it "several dozen minutes". I stand corrected. --Hecato (talk) 15:47, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Hecato - No. It takes a few days.  As User:BrownHairedGirl points out, the reference to portal maintainers in the portal guidelines is plural.  That means that you can't just sit down and resolve that issue in a few minutes or an hour because you need at least two maintainers.  So "a few minutes" is absurd.  Robert McClenon (talk) 16:07, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * So you count looking for another person as a time intensive activity of fixing a portal? If you really want to dig out the literal interpretation of POG: it does not even say a portal needs to have readers or maintainers, just that it needs to be likely to attract them. Go ahead and prove some likelihoods. POG was not written as a deletion guide and demanding more than one dedicated signed-up maintainers for a portal (which almost no portal has or ever had) is just a tactic to justify the on-going mass deletion of the portal space. But like I said, I don't want to get into another pointless argument again, I just responded because I thought you were funny. Go ahead and have the last word. --Hecato (talk) 16:27, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I am wholly unsurprised to see that @Hecato continues their dogged opposition to the long-standing principle that portals need maintenance, and that they shouldn't be dependant upon one lone editor. This is the same Hecato who only a few weeks ago proposed that all countries should automatically be treated as broad topics which pass POG, so that portal fans could amuse themselves by-creating deleted country portals. Many countries have only a tiny set of high-quality articles, no active WikiProject, and a long history of portal neglect, so the effect would have been to re-create yet more portals whose failure was pretty much guaranteed.  It is sad that so many of the defenders of portals are so vastly more interested in quantity than in quality, and to try bizarre wikilawyering arguments such as Hecato's claim above that portals need neither readers nor maintainers. It makes a terrible argument against deletion, but it makes compelling evidence that some portal fans just make portals for their own amusement, rather than to serve readers.  After 6 months of portal MFDs, it us very clear that there is now a strong community consensus against the having such useless portals. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:39, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
 * * Major countries. City states etc. obviously not included. And most people seemed to agree that major countries are broad topics. Nice deflection by the way. The question above was about what POG literally says, not what is established consensus. If you want to wikilayer with the plural usage of "maintainers" then don't get mad if people wikilayer back. Ah I was baited into another response. --Hecato (talk) 08:07, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Not so, @Hecato. If you want to wikilawyer, then check what you actually wrote, rather than what in hindsight you might have been wiser to write. Here's the diff You used the heading Are major nation portals about "broad subject areas", but the actual question you asked omitted the word "major": "Given the about 20 on-going MfDs about country portals. Can we get a consensus on whether a nation is a broad subject area?"
 * That phrase "a nation" does not exclude city states, and it does not underdeveloped countries with v poor coverage on en.wp.  The list of "about 20 .. country portals" listed at MFD when you made that post was: Niger, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Botswana, Gabon, Rwanda, Albania, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Namibia, Kyrgyzstan, Montenegro, Cape Verde, Bhutan, Maldives, Ottoman Empire. That's the set that spurred you into action.
 * And yes, of course you got some support there ... because instead of starting an RFC or asking a general audience at the village pump, you asked at a page dominated by portals fans who mostly wanted to keep every last abandoned junk portal, and some of them even shouted "war on portals" when the deletion of TTH's portalspam was proposed. And when I repeatedly suggested that you open an RFC to test broader consensus, you didn't do so. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 11:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Asking for opinions is not the same thing as advocacy of one viewpoint or another. That request for opinions is indeed about all nation portals as a whole, that does not mean I think all nations are inherently broad topics. Figuring out which ones are was part of that request. That topic was started when smaller nation portals (some of which I thought were broad enough) were getting deleted and soon afterwards portals for larger nations and even continents were getting set up for deletion (Asia among them). Appropriate timing if you ask me. Nothing prevents you from creating a wider-scale RFC, you have my full support. --Hecato (talk) 13:49, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete – the table above shows me two things: one, 50 page views per day isn't a lot and pales in comparison to what the article gets. Two, while Portal:Religion might be broad enough of a topic to attract enough readers and maintainers (I'm not sure, I haven't looked at it), individual religions and philosophies do not seem to be broad enough. Given the age of the portal (10 years) and the paucity of content and readership, it seems clear that this portal topic is not broad enough to meet WP:POG. – Levivich 06:06, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Without prejudice to recreation, as suggests. I think any effort put into portal maintenance would be better spent on actual articles- as noted above, Buddhism is a big topic with thin active editor support. If there is useful work that can be saved via Draft space or something similar for things like the anniversary lists, I would support that. --Spasemunki (talk) 06:50, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator and Newshunter12, with no prejudice against re-creation in the future with a modern design that does not involve forks, due to the reasonable level of page views and reasonable breadth of topic. -Crossroads- (talk) 06:29, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep per and WP:DEADLINE. 24.72.14.64 (talk) 04:46, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep - WP:POG is not a guideline nor does it have broad community consensus to be one. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:51, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Note on POG. It is true that WP:POG has today been downgraded to an information page, per the belated closure of WP:POG2019RFC.
 * However, if POG is no longer a guideline, then we apply WP:COMMONSENSE.
 * In the last 6 months, over 850 portals have been been deleted for failing the principles set out in the nomination. Community consensus on those principles is very clear and very stable.
 * Without a guideline, we apply WP:COMMONSENSE. Those advocating "keep" make no attempt to explain why they think that a portal on a narrow topic, abandoned by its creator with no WikiProject support and no active maintainers is worth keeping.  The nomination offers clear reasons for deletion; the "keep" voters are simply taking a WP:ILIKEIT stance. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:47, 26 September 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.