Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Colonialism

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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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:46, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Colonialism

 * – (View MfD)

Portal:Colonialism is an unmaintained portal. The portal had | 22 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 1588 for the head article.
 * 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.
 * The portal has 20 articles and 8 biographies, all of which were content-forked in 2010, some of which have been updated through 2017. It has been recognized in recent MFD discussions that content forks on living persons become obsolete if the person either has additional achievements or dies, and the article is updated, but the fork is left as it was.  It is less obvious that a content fork of a biography can become obsolete more than a hundred years after the death of its subject.  Biography 7, of Queen Victoria, states that she is longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning female monarch of all time.  That was true in 2010, and Victoria died in 1901, but her great-granddaughter Elizabeth II has surpassed her times.  This illustrates the unsoundness of content forks.
 * It is said, by naïve defenders of unmaintained portals, that the past does not change. Our interpretations of the past do change.  And comparisons of the past with the present change as the present changes.
 * Low readership, no recent maintenance, and a blatant illustration of the need for maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:48, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Not even a major concept, quite hard to qualify what should even be in this portal. Plus outdated and unmaintained. Kingsif (talk) 13:23, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Per nom. Same author also created the "still-born" WikiProject Colonialism in 2010, also abandoned (should be MfD'ed).  Almost zero adoption and support (topic really not suitable for a WikiProject, and not a Portal).  Huge risk of POV-forking in this very controversial subject.  The two articles in the portal (outside of the link to the Colonialism Main Article), Mumbai and Edward VII are not mentioned in the Colonialism Main Article? Major issue here. Britishfinance (talk) 14:19, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom. This is a long abandoned, low-view portal on a controversial and nuanced topic prone to POV-issues. It is not a suitable topic for a portal, let alone material that can just be abandoned for years at a time without tending by topic knowledgeable maintainers. Just delete this junk. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:27, 12 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 new links would be to Portal:Politics + Portal:History. Politics is not a great fit, so it may be better to skip it. I lean towards inclusiveness in respect of links (better to add a link too many than to omit one which might be useful), but I'd welcome other views. Pinging the participants above: . --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:09, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - First, I agree only as to Portal:History (and that is a Main Page portal). Second, the difficulty to determine what to do with this portal illustrates that its subject-matter is not well-defined, which is a reason to delete.  Robert McClenon (talk) 05:17, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * OK, Unless others argue for including P:Politics, I will just use Portal:History. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 06:02, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I support moving the links to just Portal:History. Newshunter12 (talk) 15:49, 14 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. I strongly disagree with Kingsif's assertion that colonialism is not even a major concept. On the contrary the process of colonialism defined the current political maps of the whole of South America and North America, Oceania, all of Africa, much of Asia (including the middle east) and chunks of Europe (e.g. Ireland was a de facto colony for about 800 years).  Colonialism is also the crucial factor in the demographics of Australasia and the Americas. And it's a crucial part of the history of the mostly European countries which had colonies, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom (the last two being pretty much defined by the process).
 * However, even broad topics make viable portals only if they attract readers and editors, and have the active support and scrutiny of an active WikiProject. (Without that scrutiny, portals are vulnerable not just to vandalism but to stealthy drive-by makeovers by The Portal Rescue Crew, whose list-making enthusiasm is wholly undeterred by lack of topic expertise and unimpeded by the application of any stated criteria other than quality thresholds. The dire results of TPRC's prolific efforts can be seen e.g. at MFD:Portal:Transport and MFD:Portal:Ghana).  None of those conditions is met here ... which is probably why the 2010 addition to the biogs of Queen Victoria and Edward VII has gone unchallenged for 9 years, despite the relative importance of those two people to the history of colonialism (their ministers were much more significant).
 * @Robert McClenon has helpfully described in some detail the neglect of the content forks. @Britishfinance notes the abandonment by the creator,  who last edited any part of en.wp in 2010. I add some evidence of the lack of interest from WikiProjects: WhatlinksHere to this portal in WikipediaTalk namespace gives 3 hits, but two of them are just header templates. The only links from  an actual discussion page is a 2008 mention on WT:WikiProject Colonial Empires and that's just the talk page of a redirect.
 * So there is nothing to sustain this portal. Readers would be much better served by visiting that article than  a rotted portal, and editors' time would be better used by improving it beyond its current C-class status. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:57, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Perhaps that was poorly phrased, let me note here that my comment was reflecting how the subject may be broad, but in terms of Wikipedia, how to we know what pages should appear on the portal? Besides anything starting with "Colonialism in..." and specific period pages on "Country X as a colony", everything else is just "History of the UK" etc, and belongs at History more directly. Not a well-defined concept enough to warrant separation from History. Kingsif (talk) 13:29, 14 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.