Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Franconia

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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. The vast majority of Keep voters in this MfD seem to be arguing that since WP:POG is no longer considered a guideline, there is no longer any reason for which a portal can be deleted. This is obviously far from the truth, and therefore these votes have necessarily been ignored. As the nominator points out, we can fall back on WP:COMMONSENSE. Additionally, WP:POG is still listed as an informational page, which "describes the editing community's established practice on some aspect or aspects of Wikipedia's norms and customs." Until new, updated guidelines are written and accepted, WP:POG continues to document the status quo, and is the best thing we can use. After ignoring rationales based only on the absence of a guideline, there is clear consensus to delete. ‑Scottywong | [confabulate] || 23:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Franconia

 * – (View MfD)

Abandoned, static mini-portal on Franconia, a historical region in Germany, now divided between three German states. Very low pageviews. Copied from the German de:Portal:Franken.

Created in May 2016 by, who has done a lot of work on German portals and has pioneered the use of the German Wikipedia's "mega-navbox" style of portal. This uses navbox-like lists of articles to provide direct access to lots of them, complete with the built-in previews available to non-logged-in readers on all en.wp pages. It's vastly more usable than the predominant but hideous one-subpage-at-a-time model. Sadly, readers seem no more interested in it than in the subpage portals, so in Jan–Jun 2019 this portal averaged only 5 views day, which is barely above background noise.

This structure doesn't have a farm of content-forked sub-pages, so Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Franconia contains very few content pages, but they have all been abandoned since their creation in 2016, without even drive-by edits. Portal:Franconia/New Articles is particularly notable, because since creation in 2016, it has listed only the same article: Hohenloher Ebene östlich von Wallhausen, which is a redlink because the page has never existed on English Wikipedia. On German Wiki, Hohenloher Ebene östlich von Wallhausen it does exist, having been created in May 2016 ... so there seems to be have been no adaptation to English Wikipedia.

Similarly, the lists of featured articles and good articles refer to their status on German Wikipedia, not on en.wp. Thankfully, those are explicitly labelled as such, but it's a bit of a useless list to display to readers of en.wp. There are two bluelinked articles on the list of Features articles: Hesselberg (B-class), and Kordigast (stub). Telling the reader that they are feature-class in a different language on another website doesn't help much. If readers were good at reading German, then they'd probably have gone direct to German Wikipedia to read about Germany.

This all looks like a page which might be of help to editors, but it's at best unhelpful to readers.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This fails on all four counts:
 * 1)  Broad topic . Depends how you define it.  If the scope is defined as the whole of the history of that area, then it may be big enough ... but that involves framing contemporary topics through a historical region which now crosses multiple internal borders.  That seems  a bit POV and also creates a lot of overlap between portals.
 * 2)  High readership .  No. 5 views per day is very low.
 * 3)  Lots of maintainers . No. As far as I can see, nobody except Bemicourt has done anything to this portal other than format-tweak the portal's main page, and since 21 May 2016 Bermicourt has done only two edits to the portal: one in July 2016,  and one in Dec 2018 .  The latter edit was a bit naughty, because it updated the portal maintenance status even though there had been no maintenance for 2½ years.
 * 4)  WikiProject involvement . No. There is no WP:WikiProject Franconia, which means that there is no systematic assessment of Franconia articles to feed to the portal. The portal's talkpage is tagged for WP:WikiProject Germany, but its talk page+archives contain only one mention of the portal: Bermicourt's May 2016 announcement of the portal's creation, which got no response.

The experience of 6 months of MFDs scrutinising many hundreds of portals has shown that many countries don't even make viable portals, and sub-national regions even more rarely. Despite en.wp's huge systemic bias towards American topics, even many states of the United States had portals which failed. This isn't even a sub-national region; it's a former sub-national region, now fragmented across several sub-national jurisdictions.

This portal was created in good faith, mimicking the German system of portals. But on en.wp it has failed, because nobody has done anything to build on Bericourt's starting point. There is no active WikiProject to support it, and almost no interest in reading it, and it is rotting. Time to just delete this portal (or move it to project space, to which it seems better suited). Since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:13, 23 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Note on backlinks. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if this discussion is closed as delete, I suggest that the backlinks be removed.  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries, but in this case I see no single alternative portal.  And in any case there are only |5 links from articles. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:16, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. Only 5 daily pageviews, which is at the noise level.  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this junk portal forever.Catfurball (talk) 22:55, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per detailed analysis by BrownHairedGirl. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:07, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator,  Brown HairedGirl . A portal on an incredibly narrow topic and with almost no views is a portal that is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:58, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. The portal is not 'abandoned' at all and the rest of the argument is based on editor-invented, Aunt Sally cut-and-paste criteria based loosely on an obsolete, decade-old guideline. Most articles on Wikipedia would fail these criteria. Again inappropriate timing while the community discusses the future of portals... BTW the relevant project are the Germany and History WikiProjects. And again, if you take an incredibly narrow view of portals, you will fall victim to an incredibly narrow conclusion. These portals are used to generate a one-page overview of current coverage and quality of article topics which is then used to prioritise and create new articles and improve existing ones. So they aren't searching for a problem - they're solving problems for those editors working on expanding the sum of human knowledge. Bermicourt (talk) 18:48, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bermicourt, I made a civil, reasoned nomination citing the long-standing portal guidelines and following the hundreds of MFD discussions which have applied those guidelines in this way. The guidelines have not changed since I made other similar nominations, so of course I present my assessment in a similar, structured way, in order to help other editors reviewing the nomination. It's a great pity that you have chosen yet again respond to a civil, reasoned, unexceptional MFD nomination by alleging bad faith, and by then again indulging in blatant denialism about the evidence of abandonment.  Your WP:OWNership issues are becoming severe, and do you no credit.
 * You say that the relevant project are the Germany and History WikiProjects. However, the only projects with which you tagged the portal are Germany and Geography.  Which Bermicourt should we believe: the December 2017 Bermicourt, or the September 2019 Bermicourt?
 * I note that you say These portals are used to generate a one-page overview of current coverage and quality of article topics which is then used to prioritise and create new articles and improve existing ones. In other words, these portals which readers shun were intended by you primarily as an aid to editors. That is why I suggested in the last para of the nomination that an alternative to deletion might be to move it to project space, to which it seems better suited.  It's a pity that before posting your pile of ABF accusations and evidence denial, you either didn't read the nomination or chose to ignore that suggestion. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:45, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

And Bermicourt's last sentence is self-contradictory: trash perfectly good portals, useful as navigation and project tools, that simply need a better structure to enable their navigation function. If they need a whole new structure to fulfil their navigation function, then they are clearly not "perfectly good".
 * Keep, no policy or guideline based criteria for deletion have been given (WP:POG is not even a guideline). WP:IDONTLIKEPORTALS is not a valid argument for deletion. I would suggest to remove the "new articles" box, though, or use a bot to populate it like most German Wikipedia portals do. —Kusma (t·c) 09:57, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep, as Kusma has pointed out WP:POG is not a guideline, it would need community consensus to be implemented. With all of the effort focused into these deletions, just as much effort could go into fixing the issues up. ((WP:NOTCLEANUP) - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:49, 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) 18:44, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * By WP:COMMONSENSE, we should keep pages that are harmless and do not violate any policies and guidelines. The "delete" voters are simply using irrelevant points (like the number of pageviews) to justify their WP:IDONTLIKEPORTALS stance. —Kusma (t·c) 19:06, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Abandoned portals are not harmless. They waste the time of readers, and damage Wikipedia's reputation. Kusma and others are trying to preserve abandoned portals simply because some editors like making them (tho not maintaining them), even tho these abandoned portals serve no encyclopedic purpose. They violate core policies such as WP:INDISCRIMINATE, WP:LINKFARM ... and Wikipedia does not exist to provide a space where editors can create wholly unreferenced pages which languish unused and unmaintained.  This is an enyclopedia, not Geocities.
 * Kusma is having fun repeating WP:IDONTLIKEPORTALS. But the reality which Kusma and others try to obscure is that WP:READERSDONTLIKEPORTALS, and especially that WP:READERSDONTLIKEABANDONEDPORTALS.  If the portal fan club want to keep pages like this, they should support moving them to project space, and stop wasting readers's time with them. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:55, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Can we please get community consensus on the matter? I agree that some portals should be deleted, just not all of them. There needs to be a better criteria put into place that a majority will agree on. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:06, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * KK87: Community consensus on the criteria above is already exceptionally clear. Those criteria will not lead to the deletion of all portals.
 * Choosing this portal as the ground for a big stand is utterly perverse. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:14, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * There is no community consensus on the criteria which you have invented e.g. "Lots of maintainers" is neither stated nor defined at WP:POG and maintainers are only mentioned in the opening stanza. There is a small band of editors who follow in your wake with "per nom" comments; that is hardly community consensus.
 * You contradict yourself in saying portals are "wasting readers' time"; if pages views are so low, it is barely a factor.
 * Finally, remember that a) portals are not articles so page views are largely irrelevant b) page views will be low because POG says there should only be one link from mainspace and so c) POG fails because it expects portals to be have high readership but only allows one link. So POG's own structure contradicts its intent. DUH. So d) POG is an out-of-date discredited failure that should be scrapped and started again. Yet it's been [mis]used to trash perfectly good portals, useful as navigation and project tools, that simply need a better structure to enable their navigation function. Bermicourt (talk) 11:21, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh dear. I had better take those one at a time.
 * If the deletion of over 850 portals one at a time over the last six months had simply been the work of some clique who ignored community consensus, there would long ago have been an outcry and more editors would have opposed deletion. Instead, deletion is opposed only by the same small hard core of portal creators.
 * Whether the number of viewers is 1 or 100,000 an abandoned portals wastes the time of each reader who visits it.
 * There is no pageview test for articles. The criteria for keeping or deleting articles are based on the fact that they are content. Portals are not content (they are a tool for navigation/showcasing of content), so different criteria apply, based on whether they serve that purpose.
 * It is simply untrue to say that WP:POG only allows one link; many portals have links from thousands of articles. Bermicourt should not disrupt MFD by making such absurdly false assertions.
 * POG was de-guidelined because it recommended an old and broken design of portals. However, the core POG criteria of broad topic/high pagviews/multiple maintainers/associated WikiProject have repeatedly been endorsed at MFD, so they still stand. The claim that portals simply need a better structure to enable their navigation function has been made for years, but nobody has yet produced a better design which demonstrably achieves that effect and demonstrably meets readers' needs.
 * What Bermicourt's post amount to is that after 14 years of Wikipedia portals, their defenders are still promising that some day in the future they will devise a structure which actually adds enough value for readers that readers will use them in non-trivial numbers. As they say, good luck with that ... and when you have developed and tested such a portal, then maybe there will be grounds for re-creating some of the deleted portals.  But even then, it will be hard to make the case that a fragmented historic sub-sub-national region will be a suitable topic for a new portal. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:09, 28 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete, but allow moving / refactoring to something in the Wikiproject namespace for editors if desired per nom. The pageviews are too low for viability.  SnowFire (talk) 23:09, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep no policy-based reason for deletion given. Page views aren't a reason for deletion.  Appears to be in decent shape. Hobit (talk) 17:30, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * If Hobit had actually read the nomination, they would see the evidence that the portal is not in decent shape. It is also unmaintained, and has no supporting WikiProject. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:46, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
 * There is a difference between disagreeing with you and being wrong. If you'd like to politely discuss it, I'd be happy to do so.  Hobit (talk) 22:36, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Hobit, I did politely discuss it, by setting out the evidence in the nomination.
 * You rudely responded with a classic WP:ILIKEIT vague wave offering no explanation for why you dissent from my analysis. If you want to change your approach and start providing some reasons supported by evidence, then we can have that polite discussion which I hoped for when I wrote the nomination. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 08:55, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Your argument (I don't think it's evidence) for deletion was fine. Your responses to me and others here have been quite rude IMO ("utterly perverse", "Oh dear", referring to people you are responding to in the 3rd person which you've done at least twice here).  But let's break down the situation rather than behavior.  I responded with the fact that we have no guidelines or policy for keeping or deleting portals.  As I understand that, it's true.  So we fall back on general policy.  Things like pageviews are not a valid reason for deletion anywhere on Wikipedia as far as I know.  Being out of date or unmaintained are not an argument for deletion anywhere on Wikipedia.  You cited an info page that covers best practices and then assessed your own thoughts on how well this meets those best practices.  Those best practices are not a criteria for deletion.  So I don't believe you've provided valid reasons for deletion.  IAR is fine (an given there is no relevant policy, that an common sense are what we have).  And yes, I think someone interested in the subject would find the portal quite useful.  And since we are at IAR/commonsense, that's a perfectly valid reason for keeping something.  In fact, I'd argue a great reason for keeping it.  The contrary argument, that it is not useful, or even worse, actively harmful, would be a reason for deletion IMO.  But pageviews aren't. So yes, I do feel your arguments are largely wrong here. I hope my reasons for believing that are clearer now. Hobit (talk) 22:37, 2 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - Per WP:COMMONSENSE Second level country divisions not are a broad subject area. The ideal would be to work on these topics in the country portal.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:04, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment That's simply your WP:POV; nowhere in WP:POG does it say country divisions are not a broad subject area. Another example of where POG utterly fails is that it doesn't define words like 'broad' enabling deletionists to drive a coach and horses through the portal system. Bermicourt (talk) 16:34, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * This is just a word game. I believe everyone has understood what a broad topic is. I've argued this here, here and here.
 * a sincere question. If I want to write about my state, Minas Gerais, which you think is best, I create a Portal:Minas Gerais with less than a dozen pageviews a day or valorize the Portal:Brazil with a section about the states of Brazil?Guilherme Burn (talk) 18:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Guilherme Burn (talk) 18:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Everyone thinks they have understood what a broad topic is; we have just understood it differently and the ex-guideline is no help.
 * Re your question: it seems to me that it's founded on the assumption that 1) portals are like articles, 2) that they are well-linked, 3) that page views matter and so 4) a lack of page views = delete the portal. I have argued persistently that portals are not articles, that they are poorly linked because POG only requires ONE link from mainspace, that their main role is as navigation aids and project tools. I'm happy to put on hold all creation, expansion and deletion of portals while POG is discussed and rewritten, but it's clear that a few editors are bent on destroying them as quickly as possible before the community wakes up to the fact that it's decision to keep and not deprecate portals has been ignored. And then there will be the inevitable backlash. Bermicourt (talk) 19:53, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * If portals are a project tool, then they should be in a project space and not in a reader space. The "navigation aid" part is much better served in other ways, as viewership stats show. No "keep all portals" decision has ever been made, just one not to "delete all portals". It is perfectly fine to evaluate portals individually, which is what we are doing. MfD is a public forum, so implying this is some furtive effort is improper. -Crossroads- (talk) 20:54, 1 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep the topic doesn't seem that unreasonable, Franconia appears to be a recognised region of Germany with a distinctive culture and history and a population of about five million. I don't think the rest of the nomination makes much of a case for deletion at all. WP:POG has been deprecated and doesn't explicitly say that portals without recent edits or with few pageviews should be deleted anyway. Pretending that these criteria have general support because of "common sense" is dubious at best, they aren't used to delete pages anywhere else on Wikipedia. Issues with individual components of the portal can be addressed through editing. The portal has obviously had a lot of work put into it and I think it does provide value to the reader.  Hut 8.5  21:32, 2 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.