Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Iowa

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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:  no consensus. ‑Scottywong | confabulate _ 07:00, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Iowa


This is an unmaintained and little-viewed portal on a state of the United States. This portal has 10 articles and 5 biographies, but none more recent than 2011. In The News Items are from 2011 and 2012, including the re-election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. The Governor of Iowa is correctly identified, but that is because the portal is picking that information up from the infobox for the lead article Iowa.

The following is a listing of the least-viewed state portals:

A complete listing of state portals with metrics can be seen at WP:US State Portal Metrics. Portals that are not maintained are useless, and, if the information that is facing the reader becomes out-of-date, they are worse than useless, because anyone can edit an article, but heritage portals with subpages contain old copies of articles that require special knowledge to edit.

One common method for the design of portals, in use at least since 2005, has involved sometimes large numbers of subpages of the portal, one for each selected article and picture, and sometimes for news items and Do You Know (DYK) items. Often the subpages for selected articles consist of a copy of the original article, or a copy of the first part of the original article. The subpages for In The News (ITN) and DYK items may also be copies of the lead paragraph or a portion of the article page. This approach to design of portals is sufficiently commonly used that it can be considered standard. However, it is an honorable experiment that has failed, and should be abandoned. In numerous cases, it has been found that portals have displayed outdated and incorrect information to the reader. These discrepancies have been especially common with, but not limited to, political leadership. These discrepancies are a serious problem because they cannot be readily corrected. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, meaning that any reasonably computer-literate person can edit an article; but editing the displayed information in a portal requires specialized technical knowledge of how portals are implemented, which is presumably why errors persist, sometimes for years. An editor who has Twinkle installed can tag articles in need of editing if they do not have the time or knowledge to fix them; but tagging via Twinkle is not available for portals. Experience has shown that the use of portal subpages that copy portions of articles results in outdated information being displayed, sometimes for years, because it is difficult to correct. This design technique, partial article copies, has been an honorable experiment over the course of more than a decade, but the experiment should be assessed to have been a failure. It has also been noted that copying portions of articles to portal subpages without attribution is a violation of the CC-BY-SA copyleft and is not permitted. Some other design approach for portals should be used in the future.

A state of the United States may be considered a priori to be a broad subject area, but this portal has been shown a posteriori not to be attracting readers or a portal maintainer. A portal is a miniature Main Page and requires a substantial investment in volunteer time.

This portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer who is willing to invest the time to support a miniature Main Page under the portal guidelines that are in effect at the time, but not involving partial copies to subpages. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:27, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Yet another abandoned portal.
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". A theoretical argument could be made that Iowa is a broad topic. I disagree with that theoretical argument (sub-national entities rarely seem to work as portals), but we don't need to rely on theory because we have empirical evidence that in practice this portal does not pass that test: it has not attracted maintainers, and it has not attracted readers. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:55, 28 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep: This portal contains basic information about the state but needs updating and improvement.  It would be far better to mark this portal as needing updating and improvement rather than simply deleting it.  It is far easier to rebuild a portal than to create a portal from scratch, unless you want to delete all portals, which is a whole other issue.  For the status of regional portals, see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals.  Our regional portals are dying a slow death.  It would be far more humane to kill them all with a single stroke.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 17:52, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * It's easy to write of updating and improvement, but the reality is that this is just another of the many hundred of portals which languished for a decade without being improve or updated.  It gets too few readers to attract the efforts of editors, so if it is kept it will simply continue to rot.
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Buaidh's comment is just more of the magical thinking which a decade ago saw editors create hundreds of portals on a high-maintenance model ... but a decade later we can see the evidence that there simply aren't enough editors willing and able to maintain this portal. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:00, 1 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep: no valid reason for deletion -this odd rationale will have every portal gone.....read over WP:RIA "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted. Attribution can be belatedly supplied"...fixit as per  Village pump (proposals) . It's very concerning that your deleting portal after portal but have no clue how to fix them or to lazy to tag them manually to inform the community that a portal needs updating.. -- Moxy 🍁 09:11, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Moxy, the valid reason is that WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This portal does not meet that criterion.
 * It is risible to the point of disruptiveness that Moxy continues to cite the WP:ENDPORTALS RFC while showing no sign of actually having read it. ENDPOIRTALS was a proposal to delete all portals in one go, and that proposal was rejected. It was not a proposal to keep every abandoned junk portal, and Moxy's repeated pretence that it means something other than what it said is dishonest. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:05, 1 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep This is an asinine deletion request, and as stated above it's just plain lazy. If it needs to be updated than mark it accordingly and see if someone does that first. Also, the smaller states are going to generate less interest. Should we start eliminating other pages related to them because they don't generate as much interest? We need more editors to do the work rather than busybodies eliminating what we already have. Farragutful (talk) 15:41, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Fine rant, Farragutful. Hope you feel better after that.
 * But the bottom line is that issues such as this are not decided by rants but by policy and guidelines, and the fact remains that this portals does not meet the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:08, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Your main problem is linking a disputed page...so hard to see its weight as it applies here. What do you personally consider a big topic and worthy of keeping or effort to fix ....I take it 15,186 articles is to smal as is 35, 000 as stated in the past.....how big?-- Moxy 🍁 22:14, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Moxy, you are either being very childish or have exceedingly low comprehension skills. Or maybe both.
 * WP:POG is a longstanding guideline, and the fact that someone has tagged it as disputed does not invalidate it. AS you know, the discussion there is strongly in favour of upholding the clauses which you dislike.
 * As you well know, the breadth of a topic is not defined solely by article count. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... so a portal with a scope of a billion articles fails if it lacks readers and maintainers. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:18, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:POG is a pariah guideline, it failed to gain consensus support, and masqueraded as a guideline ever since. It has been proven to be hopelessly lax, full of lax, dreamlike statements. It allowed for a free for all mass creation of unsuitable portals. *Not even* meeting WP:POG is a damning indictment. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:25, 3 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Fails the objectives of a portal (it doesn’t help anyone with anything). Redundant to the parent article.  —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:39, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep and tag with the Update template. Then notify relevant Wikiprojects that the portal would benefit from updating. I consider U.S. states to meet WP:POG guidelines in terms of being broad enough in topical scope to qualify for a portal. Cheers, North America1000 12:18, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
 * NA1K's personal view of the guidelines is not supported by the long-standing text of the guidelines. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Per the evidence above this one has not attracted either readers or maintainers.
 * XFD decisions should be made on the basis of actual guidelines, not on the basis of one editor's desire to apply the Humpty Dumpty principle that ""When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." @Northamerica1000 is an admin, and should know better than to try reducing this discussion to Alice in Wonderland, so I hope that the closing admin will discount this flight of fancy.
 * In other discussions, NA1K has offered to to do a rapid update of the portal. I note that there is no such offer here, and instead NA1K proposes tagging the portal to ask someone else to do the update.
 * The that a solution lies in tagging a portal with update is risible, and it is demonstrably made in bad faith. As NA1K well knows, very few editors work on portals: they are complex to edit, and have low readership, so editors rightly choose to put their energies elsewhere. That is why the majority of portals which existed a year ago had rotted for years or even for a decade: there are not enough willing maintainers to sustain such a wide number of portals.
 * The idea that any portal will magically attract maintainers might have made sense a decade ago in the era when the editor base was rapidly growing ... but n 2019, with editor numbers much much lower, it's not just a flight of fancy or magical thinking: it's a straightforward denial of reality.
 * What this portal needs, like other abandoned portals, is not just two hours of rapid update to raise it just above a deletion threshold. what it needs is:
 * updating
 * a complete overhaul to avoid replicating the functionality provided by the new wiki technologies (see below)
 * ongoing maintenance
 * @Northamerica1000 is bringing here the approach used in their days with the WP:Article Rescue Squadron, which was to preserve some stub on a barely notable topic by adding a few sourced factoids which brought it just over the WP:Notability threshold. That approach in article space just left us with perma-stubs, and when applied to portals it just preserves abandoned portals to rot again.
 * NA1K repeatedly says of abandoned portals that "there is only so much one person can do", and I agree entirely. One person may be able to rush around like  a firefighter on amphetamines and push a series of portals over the threshold, but that one person cannot maintain the dozens of portals which have no other maintainer.
 * NA1K's approach is to preserve portals at any cost, regardless of quality and regardless of whether they are maintained. They objected angrily to populating Category:All portals because it was "being used by deletionists".  They propose the propose deletion of Category:Abandoned country portals, because they prefer not to identify abandon portals.
 * The lead of WP:POG has said since 2006 "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create". Note that phrase "kept up to date" . Not updated once in a drive-by-session, but regularly maintained. NA1K is not even offering to do that.
 * Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
 * mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links.  Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than  a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.   Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow
 * Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.
 * Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game, and NA1K doesn't even suggest any way in which they intend to avoid duplicating the new built-in features.
 * After a decade of widespread abandonment of portals, hundreds of recent MFDs show that consensus has turned against indefinitely keeping this sort of abandoned junk in the hope that every few years it may get the sort of sporadic update which NA1K promises. It is time for NA1K to stop defending the junk. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:57, 3 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep - The portal needs updating and editors seem to be willing to work on improvements. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:42, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete worthless junk portal, one selected article and 5 selected 5 biographies.Catfurball (talk) 19:57, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Regional Portals
Some editors have stated that particular levels of regions should have portals. User:Kusma wrote (in April, in an MFD): "all countries should have portals". User:Northamerica1000 wrote: "I consider U.S. states to meet WP:POG guidelines in terms of being broad enough in topical scope to qualify for a portal." Such statements raise a two-part question, having to do with people, and with policies.

Who Should Do What?
The first part of the question is: Who is expected to do what in order to provide the portal? Should Wikipedia provide and maintain a portal? Should Wikipedia provide a portal without maintaining it? Should Wikipedia provide a portal, contingent on having a portal maintainer and a portal maintenance plan? Should the Internet, of which Wikipedia is a prominent site, provide a portal? If only that, the government of the nation, state, or province can and almost certainly does provide and maintain a portal in the form of its web site, as do lesser regions such as counties, cantons, districts, communes, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and villages.

If Wikipedia is expected to provide and maintain a portal, how can that obligation be reconciled with Wikipedia is not compulsory? If Wikipedia is only expected to provide an empty portal, what good is that? It appears that the implication is that Wikipedia is expected to provide a portal to a maintainer and to continue to keep the portal facing outward toward the readers whether or not it is being maintained. Portal advocates who think that particular levels of regions "should have" portals should clarify what obligation they are implying and on whom.

Impact on Policies and Guidelines
The second part of the question is how the idea that countries or states "should have" portals should be reflected in Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. At present, the page that is designated as the Portal Guidelines states that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract readers and portal maintainers. Portal advocates have focused on the reference to "broad subject areas" and have disregarded the two-part reference to readers and portal maintainers. At present, the status of the portal guidelines is in dispute. Those who would like to retain existing regional portals, and possibly create more regional portals, may either deal with the existing guidelines or propose to revise them. If they prefer to deal with the existing guidelines, there are two issues. The first is that the status of the guidelines is in doubt, appearing to have been a failed proposal. The second is that the existing document refers to readers and maintainers, who cannot simply be assumed or willed into existence. Since the present (contested) guidelines refer not simply to broad subject areas, but to broad subject areas that will attract readers and portal maintainers, any specific portal can be shown by observation not to be attracting readers or maintainers.

The other option for the advocates of regional portals, or for anyone who wants to provide better guidelines with regard to portals, would be to publish a Request for Comments to implement new portal guidelines, either the old guidelines, or a slightly revised version of the old guidelines, or an entirely new set of guidelines. In that case, advocates of regional portals should be on notice that the new guidelines either should explicitly identify certain subjects that are considered portal-worthy even without maintenance, or it can be understood that regional portals, like other subject areas, are only considered to be broad subject areas if they demonstrate that they attract readers and maintainers. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:29, 5 July 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.