Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Dorset

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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. Although some editors have proposed to improve the portal, the broader consensus includes the view that this is too narrow a topic to merit a portal even if improved. bd2412 T 21:02, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Dorset

 * – (View MfD)

Portal created in 2009 by a user whose only contributions since were 4 edits in 2012. The intro provides a population figure which is wrong by over 10 %, if the lead article is correct. Considering all subpages there were 37 edits in 10 years by 8 editors, but apart from the creator's edits they were only maintenance edits such as deletion notices. Nemo 11:09, 28 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:England), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 13:34, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment per nominator. Yet another severely-neglected portal on a narrow topic, which has failed to attract either readers or maintainers, and is actively misleading those few readers who do read there. In Jan–June 2019 it averaged only 6 views per day. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 13:38, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Converted to "comment" to avoid the appearance of a good faith "double !vote". Nemo 10:06, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Dorset shows only 11 subpages besides the portal itself, and only one article, which was last edited in 2010. That is no maintenance at all.  The portal has only 6 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 880 for the article, and 6 is no more than noise.
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should 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.  A portal that is only seldom viewed, less than 25 average views per day, does not seem to provide much value.  A portal that is not actively being maintained (preferably by at least two editors to provide backup), especially one that has not been maintained for several years, especially in a subject area that is evolving or changing, does not provide current value.  A portal that has only a small set of articles does not serve any purpose as a navigation tool and is not consistent with a broad subject area. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:32, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * What a classic. For 10 years this portal has been showing one selected article and one selected picture (ok 2 pictures of the same thing). It's been referring (twice) to events that will happen in 2012 for all that time. The school is named after a privateer.... DexDor(talk) 21:16, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear - Delete as there's clear evidence over many years that this portal (and others about similar topics) doesn't get a level of care in creation and ongoing maintenance to prevent it being so out of date or wrong as to become an embarrasment. DexDor(talk) 17:37, 4 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. All those criticisms are so minor no one would bat an eyelid if it was an article. They are all fixable. And we now seem to be fixated, not just by page views (PORTALS ARE NOT ARTICLES + THEY HAVE LOW PAGE VIEWS BECAUSE WP:POG ONLY REQUIRES ONE LINK FROM MAINSPACE), but now by page edits. Like an article, once a portal is completed it does not need an editor to come along every 5 minutes and tinker with it. Yes this needs some attention, but I'm willing to fix all those problems, so change your votes to keep and improve unless of course you WP:JUSTDONTLIKEPORTALS lol. Bermicourt (talk) 08:28, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually, if we had an article Demographics of Dorset containing only figures wrong by 10 % and over ten years old, I can imagine it would be redirected to Demographics of The United Kingdom in no time. Nemo 09:09, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Bermicourt is an experienced editor who should know better than to engage in WP:SHOUTING by writing in all caps. This is especially so when they are simply wrong: POG sets out a minimum number of links, and does not in any way preclude adding more links. However, more links does not significantly increase page views. For example, Portal:Anglicanism  was deleted a few days ago per MFD:Portal:Anglicanism, but it had only 32 pageviews/day despite having over 6,500 links from articles (I spent many hours yesterday replacing those links with links to Portal:Christianity).  In the case of this Portal:Dorset, there are 183 links from articles, and 317 links from categories. Yet it still gets only 6 pageviews per day, because v few readers use portals.
 * However, Bermicourt is right that portals are not articles, but Bermicourt misunderstands the significance of that fact. Articles which are in a poor state or little viewed are kept because they are actual encyclopedic content.  Portals are not content; they are a device for navigating the encyclopedia and/or showcasing its content, and if they don't fulfil that purpose then they have no utility.
 * Nobody is opposing the view that once a portal is completed it does not need an editor to come along every 5 minutes and tinker with it; that's simply a hyperbolic straw man. And far from being completed, this pseudo-portal was still-born: it has only one selected article (see Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Dorset), compared with POG's risibly low minimum of 20. Far from needs some attention as Bermicourt disingenuously claims, it has never even built. That fact was noted above, so Bermicourt's description of the portal's problems as minor is some unhelpful combination of delusion, disingenuous and/or dishonest.
 * Those like Bermicourt who advocate keeping a portal should desist from wasting everyone's time with arguments which have no foundation in reality ... and should especially desist from WP:SHOUTING these counter-factual absurdities. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:35, 1 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per delete votes above, per WP:TNT, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this state. What counts for our purposes are how it was treated when not being scrutinized here. Portals are not content, so comparisons to broken articles are improper. Low page views mean essentially no value is added by such portals. The end of POG cuts both ways - portal enthusiasts cannot point to any policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. -Crossroads- (talk) 19:30, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator, Robert McClenon, Dexdor and Crossroads. This one is so bad that it is only a pseudo-portal: one selected article whose topic is unchanged since its creation in 22 February 2009‎. Far from being an "enhanced main page" as WP:PORTAL sets out, this static page with one article is a waste of the time of any reader who visits it.  Luring readers to this stillborn junk is treating readers with contempt and damaging to the encyclopedia's hard-won reputation.  In this case it is fortunate that only readers per day waste their precious time by visiting the page, but that's still at least six readers too many.
 * This pseudo-portal has remained in this abysmal state for a decade without every even being tagged as problematic, or assessed by the portals project's grading scheme. It should have been speedy-deleted years ago, or at least moved to project space for incubation.  The fact that neither of those things happened is further evidence that a) the deletion of nearly 900 of the 150 portals which existed pre-portalspam still hasn't removed even the pure junk; b) the vocal defence of portals by WP:WPPORT regulars such as  (above) is not accompanied any remotely credible efforts to apply even minimal quality standards. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 10:00, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

The value of a portal lies solely in whether it adds value for readers: see WP:PORTAL's description of the goal as an "enhanced main page". Neither you nor Bermicourt offers any explanation of how readers are well-served by being lured to a portal which has been serving up falsehoods to readers for years. You arguments seem to consist solely of keeping it because it has been created. As to WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS, its relevance is that we examine pages one at a time to assess them against quality standards. Nearly 900 portals have been deleted in the last 6 months after such individualised scrutiny, but your only reason for keeping this one seems to be that we don't have every other portal under scrutiny simultaneously. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:31, 3 October 2019 (UTC) In any case, we are building an encyclopedia, and it's no part of that process to publish untruths. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:02, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Badly in need of expansion, refreshing and updating. Happy to take that on, especially as I already look after the portals for a couple of the neighbouring counties. WaggersTALK  11:48, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep - Personally, I am unconvinced about the value of portals and have never used oned myself but I don’t see why this portal is more deserving of deletion than any other. As Bermicourt  has pointed out, this does seem to be a campaign by people who just don’t like  them. If we start deleting stuff because it doesn’t get many page hits or is a narrow topic,  most of Wikipedia is going to disappear. Fair enough if this is taking up space much needed for an important article but it isn’t so where’s the harm?--Ykraps (talk) 04:54, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The reason I nominated this for deletion, rather than another, is that I started from the oldest and least developed portals. Nemo 05:32, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Ykraps: see WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 14:20, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * It sure does, and people who accept that are going to be happier for it in the long run. Also, personally, I tend not to attach too much credence to an essay, the biggest contributors of which are indefinitely blocked. [] --Ykraps (talk) 15:51, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Ykraps, the content of Wikipedia in in articles, which have their own inclusion criteria. This is not an article, and is no content; it's just a device for navigating and showcasing the content pages.  Even if deleted every single category and portal, the whole of Wikipedia's content would still be in place.
 * In my book there is a definite difference between outdated information and "falsehoods", which seems overly-dramatic. No-one has been harmed. People who rely on this sort of information don't go to Wikipedia, they go to the ONS, and if they do come here, more fool them (all 6 of them). Two people have already offered to improve the page and I think they should be allowed the opportunity to do so.--Ykraps (talk) 15:59, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * If you want an example of what (I think) is a falsehood see the "privateer" example in my comment above. The page has been displaying "Weymouth Harbour is home to cross-channel ferries ...", but the article has had that reference to ferries in the past tense for some years. Hopefully, no-one has read the portal then travelled to Weymouth hoping to take a ferry to France, but readers would be better informed (which is what an encyclopedia is for) by reading the article rather than the outdated info shown on the portal. DexDor(talk) 19:33, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Ykraps, it's hard to prove a negative such as your unevidenced assertion that no-one has been harmed. That's just a guess dressed up as fact.
 * Oh please, what disaster could possibly have befallen someone who thought Thomas Hardye was a privateer, or that they could still get a cross-channel ferry from Portland? You have massively over-estimated the importance of what you are doing here and I will not be changing my vote.--Ykraps (talk) 07:51, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Ykraps, Wikipedia is not The Sun or the National Enquirer, or any other purveyor what of whatever it might be convenient to print. It's an encyclopedia, where we aim to get things right, because that's the whole purpose of this project. The idea that accuracy and truth matter only when we have actual proof that they have caused a disaster for someone is a rejection of WP:5P2, which says that "All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources". I wish that I could be more surprised to find that a defender of a portal rejects that core principle in favour of a much lower standard. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 11:31, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The irony being that The Sun would have rather enjoyed the "Wikipedia Ruins Holidays for Thousands" drama you have imagined here. What is even more laughable is that you bemoan the untold damage this misinformation is doing but allow it to remain. I've now removed the offending material so those arguments are no longer valid. Yes, it's rather hard to prove a negative so if you have evidence that someone has suffered, please do share it with us. As I said, I am ambivalent towards portals but if people are willing to improve this one, they should be given the opportunity. Nothing you say is going to change my mind on that so I don't see the value in continuing to badger me (although no doubt you will). --Ykraps (talk) 19:19, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete A county in England is not a sufficiently broad subject area to deserve a portal. SD0001 (talk) 17:52, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: Not a broad enough topic for a portal. ToThAc (talk) 12:09, 6 October 2019 (UTC)