Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Classical antiquity

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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) 21:49, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Classical antiquity

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected portal.
 * Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are without a doubt some of the most abysmal I've seen out of a portal. It's a measly 1 for the portal versus 1245 for the parent article, or .0803%.
 * Only one selected article added in 2005; all edits made to it are routine maintenance and vandalism (and reversion of it).
 * Only three DYKs, none of which I can verify are true or if they even went through the actual DYK process.
 * Created in 2005 by, but only maintained by some users on and off in 2006 and 2007. Just like everywhere else on the portal, most other edits have been either trivial, routine maintenance, or vandalism (some grossly offensive) and its reversion.
 * Portal doesn't seem to be mentioned at all in WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome or WikiProject Military history/Classical warfare task force.

Let's just delete this useless, near-infinitely abysmal portal. ToThAc (talk) 23:33, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Note - This portal was renamed from Portal:Classical civilisation to Portal:Classical antiquity. This renaming, which is a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic, interferes with counting the lifeboats.  The proper pageview average for the portal is 20, as given at [|Portal:Classical_antiquity].  The number of 1245 pageviews for the head article is correct, and there do not appear to be any articles other than one lead.  Further analysis will follow within the next six days.  Robert McClenon (talk) 03:57, 4 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - This portal should be compared to the portals for the two main centers of what is known as classical antiquity or classical civilization, Portal:Ancient Greece and Portal:Ancient Rome, and to the main page linked History Portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:34, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Classical antiquity

 * Delete - Portal:Classical antiquity is not as bad as it initially appeared, due to a good-faith error that makes it difficult to count the lifeboats on the Titanic, but both of the subportals have better viewing and more articles, which does not mean that I am recommending that Portal:Ancient Greece or Portal:Ancient Rome be kept. Not enough articles, not enough maintenance.  Just delete it. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:34, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - User:BrownHairedGirl - I recommend either deleting the backlinks or moving them to Portal:History. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:34, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, useless portal. T8612  (talk) 14:44, 5 October 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:History), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 14:15, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. 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 long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised at the last minute just to stave off deletion. 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, since they go out of date, preserve potentially inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, as proposed by BrownHairedGirl, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 16:45, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, apart from the misunderstanding over pageviews, the nominator's analysis is spot-on, as is that by Crossroads.  This is a portal which manages a almost a full house of the classic failings of junk portals:
 * ✅ No selection of topics. Just one item under each heading. It's like very a slim single-issue of a magazine
 * ✅ No updates. It's like a slim single-issue magazine from 2005.
 * ✅ Ancient, fake DYKs.
 * ✅ Decade-plus out-of-date news. Tho it's from 30 November 2006, so at least we're not in 2005 any more.  The news is only 13 years old!
 * ✅ List of key topics which includes redlinks, not because we have no coverage, but because nobody has bothered to make the right links. And of course laid out in a ridiculously bulky format requires which requires entirely un-needed scrolling
 * ✅ A manually-built category tree which may reflect the category structure as it was in 2005, but now misses most of it.
 * ✅ A WikiProject (WP:CGR) whose talk page archive does even mention the portal, either under its current name "Classical aniquity" or under its old name "Classical civilisation"
 * ✅ a head article whose daily average of |Classical_civilisation 1,218 views is more than 60 times the portal's |Portal:Classical_civilisation daily median of 20. Demonstrating yet again that there is plenty of interest in the topic, just not in the pointless portal.

So its nearly a perfect fail. The only missing failure that I can see is being created by a now-blocked sockpuppet, which isn't the case here. We had a long run of sock-portals. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:46, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - We have also had portals created by banned edit-warriors and by banned copyviolators. For some reason, portals are often created by editors who are variously not here to cooperate.  As User:BrownHairedGirl says, that is about the only thing that isn't wrong with this portal.  Robert McClenon (talk) 16:49, 11 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.