Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Finger Lakes (2nd nomination)

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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. Ruslik_ Zero 13:23, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Finger Lakes

 * – (View MfD)

Very narrow topic, used as a WP:COATRACK.

The Finger Lakes are a set of 11 lakes in New York state. Category:Finger Lakes contains only 20 articles. The intro to the portal refers to an informal Finger lakes region, but we have no Category:Finger lakes region/Category:Finger Lakes region, and in article space is just a redirect to Finger Lakes.

In the first half of 2019, the portal averaged only 9 views per day. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:16, 13 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:New York (state)), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:21, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete overly narrow subtopic with zero growth. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 04:30, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment As User:BrownHairedGirl notes, there were 9 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 549 for the head article. Interestingly, although the article that BHG quotes says that there are 11 lakes, Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Finger_Lakes shows 14 articles, 12 attractions, 14 lakes, all forked in 2008.  Probably different authorities have different lists of the lakes.  The 40 articles were all content-forked in 2008.  Spot-checking indicates that most of them were tweaked between 2011 and 2017 and that there was no substantive maintenance and little or no later tweaking.  Robert McClenon (talk) 04:40, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Let's be honest. When I made this, portals were popular. Nowadays, they all should be deleted. Mitch 32 (Fame is a four letter word.) 04:55, 13 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. This page was rated as a featured portal, Wikipedia's highest quality ranking.  The arguments in the nomination apply to most portals: pages with links get more hits than pages with fewer links.  The rationale that portals should be deleted just for being typical portals has been dismissed at RfC and seems likely to be dismissed again at the current re-run. WP:COATRACK wisely warns about staying on topic but is specific to articles.  A portal's purpose is to advertise connected subjects such as local people and places. I'm pleased to learn that most excerpts were tweaked between 2011 and 2017, and any outdated text can easily be replaced by transclusions which will remain current whenever the underlying article is edited.  Certes (talk) 10:49, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Wow. I thought I had seen the worst when portal fans were defending farms of fake DYKs and decade-old stale DYKs as not trivia because they believe that WP:TRIVIA doesn't apply to portals.  Now we also have a portal fan claiming it's absolutely fine and great for a portal to be used as a WP:COATRACK.  So that's how the cheerleaders for portals view them: as a free-for-all where trivia is welcome and coat-racking is fine too.
 * notes that this page was rated as a featured portal. Conveniently, Certes omits to mention that the WP:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Finger Lakes was closed on 5 July 2009, i.e. over ten years ago. Note that even in the FP assessment, editors noted that the content is very remotely connected to the topic and to get FP it needs to focus on the core topics on the issue.  This was apparently resolved by changing the portal's intro to include the word "region".
 * I did a quick analysis of the selected articles + biogs, which shows the extent of the coatrackery. Some of it is specatcularly tenuous, e.g. biog/2 (Mark Twain), and biog/9 (Joseph Smith).
 * So what we actually have here is a portal named after lakes, but actually based on eponymous informal region whose status isn't even significant enough to have either a standalone article or an eponymous category. The portals' creator supports its deletion, but Certes applauds it because, hey it's info.  Maybe Certes will try telling us that portals are also exempt from WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:35, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * You know, if you spent half as much time actually building this encyclopedia as you spend trying to tear down everyone else's efforts, there would never have been any need for all the effort you've expended on portals. Special:Contributions tells me that your last 500 edits cover a span of approximately an hour and a half (speaking of "Wow").  For the sake of comparison, my last 500 edits cover a span of 11 months.  "Even Ray Charles can see" that you have all the time in the world for what I suggest. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions  17:43, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I am here to build an encyclopedia, not to facilitate its pollution with coatracks. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:12, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * User:RadioKAOS - This is something new, for an editor who makes one or two edits a day not only to think that they are an experienced editor but to insult an editor, in this case User:BrownHairedGirl, because she knows how to use AutoWikiBrowser. You would do better to acquire more experience before insulting other editors; you might realize then that insulting other editors is not useful.  Robert McClenon (talk) 13:36, 14 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Irrespective of the Portal's current contents, the topic is simply not suitable for a portal. There is not enough article content directly related to the topic to populate a portal. Additionally, the parent article is more than sufficient for introducing the topic and linking to related articles. BLAIXX 16:05, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep – Continued WP:OWN hijacking of the encyclopedia by an extremely small minority of editors. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 17:43, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep I do believe there is sufficient article content to populate a portal. --Enos733 (talk) 03:42, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Under 20 is "sufficient"? Consensus is clearly against you here. Most portals are getting nuked unless there's proof that they're not useful unless they're massive and actively maintained. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 05:49, 14 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Subject is way too narrow for a portal - the main article didn't even merit a navbox on the subject. Portal is abandoned and out-of-date, with the last material edit in June 2009, and with nothing until the TH arrived in April 2018, and nothing since that.  Main article on Finger Lakes has only 14 references, is in poor shape, and has been tagged for verification issues since 2016 and nobody seems to care about it or wants to address them (never mind the portal).  Portal is a collection of random articles tangential to the topic.
 * The portal makes Wikipedia look like a failing project of old stuff. Why would a reader want to engage with/or trust Wikipedia on the topic of Finger Lakes when they are faced with this mess of content.
 * MfDs on Portals are getting too emotional imho. We are a small community trying to manage an ever-growing platform that will crush us if we don't learn to prune that which is dying, and manage dwindling editing resources, we will get crushed. In the history of every great city are major periods when sections had to be destroyed and rebuilt.  Britishfinance (talk) 18:36, 14 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep per WP:NOTCLEANUP and WP:POPULARPAGE which gives arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:18, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. The issue is not cleanup or even popularpage - it is that the topic is to narrow. The fact that the portal is also abandonsed is an issue particular to Portals (not relevant to Article AfDs), as portals are dynamic, not static entities; however a topic this narrow should never have been a portal. Britishfinance (talk) 23:26, 14 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as per my analysis and that of nominator. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:45, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Portal:New York (state), selectively to whatever the extent that content may be from articles with high quality ratings, and can be appropriately updated. bd2412  T 11:10, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I oppose merge and redirect.
 * A redirect would violate the principle of minimising surprise.  The Portal:New York (state) covers a vastly bigger topic, and readers will ill-served by finding themselves at a portal where coverage of the advertised topic is only a trivial fraction of what's available.  For that reason, nearly all similar portal-space redirects have been deleted at by consensus at RFD.
 * A direct merger is impossible, because this portal uses sub-pages, and Portal:New York (state) uses automatic transclusion. It may be helpful for someone to review the list of articles in this portal and consider whether some of them should be added to Portal:New York (state), without unbalancing it; but that process is not merger. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:47, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't expect a merger to do more than take what is useful from the portal to be deleted to incorporate into the portal to be kept. Just looking at the selected articles, I would scrap the highways and take Syracuse, New York, Cornell University, Iroquois Confederacy, and perhaps Golden plates (since many people are surprised that Mormonism originated in New York). All of these are either former FA or FAC articles, or on the vital articles list. Any merger of content would, of course, include updating of this content, and conforming it to the presentation format of the target article. bd2412  T 18:54, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * there is no updating of this content to be done. Portal:New York (state) just uses a list of article titles.
 * Cornell University is already included in P:NY, as the first article in its selection, tho it's unsurprising you missed that because P:NY has been converted by the usual editor in to a black box format which no loner displays a visible list of topics.
 * As to the rest, adding 3 topics about a relatively small area seem to me to a bit unbalanced. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:08, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Balance is, of course, relative to what other coverage the proposed target portal provides. At the very least, the Iroquois Confederacy at one point covered most of the state. Syracuse is one of six cities named in the lede of New York (state) (the others being New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Albany), and I would expect a portal on the state to mention all of them. bd2412  T 02:44, 16 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Not a broad enough subject for a portal. Invalid OS (talk) 12:22, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete for being a dangerous collection of WP:NNPOV (more idiomatically or euphemistically described as WP:COATRACK by nominator). The DYK section is appalling for its complete failure to give the reader any information whatsoever about the nominal subject of the portal. I appreciate that certain biographical DYK were selected for the main page over ten years ago, but it borders WP:BLP violation to suggest that one person is notable for the history of an entire region only on account of something that did not happen some time in 2006 according to one local newspaper. Nemo 08:00, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per delete votes above and per the fact that 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, like an article is, since they are for navigation instead. It is therefore improper to use rationales from AfDs to argue that this failed navigation device should be kept. 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. The community's consensus not to delete all portals is not a consensus to keep all portals. 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, to avoid surprising our readers.
 * The first MfD is yet another case study of unsupported assertions that the topic is broad enough and that the portal is being maintained, which the years since have shown to be false. This portal still contains false information about Mark Twain, as shown in the collapsed table. It also appears to engage in original research when deciding what counts as the "Finger Lakes Region". -Crossroads- (talk) 21:13, 16 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.