Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Isle of Wight

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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. ‑Scottywong | [comment] || 04:10, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Isle of Wight

 * – (View MfD)

This portal should be deleted for the following reasons: Therefore, this portal should be deleted. Pkbwcgs (talk) 09:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The portal receives an average of three pageviews per day and some days it received 0 pageviews
 * The DYK fact for this portal at Portal:Isle of Wight/Did you know has not been updated since 14 November 2008
 * Portal:Isle of Wight/News hasn't been updated for a long time and the last news update was on 2nd February 2010 and it has been blanked since then
 * Portal:Isle of Wight/Selected pictures has been the same since June 2018 and the images have never been updated since then
 * Category:Isle of Wight already exists and there is an extensive list of articles and subcategories in that category
 * WikiProject Isle of Wight already exists so a portal which isn't being maintained is not required
 * There were only five days in the whole of 2019 where this portal received over 20 pageviews and the average pageviews for this portal in the whole year is five pageviews
 * Weak Delete - Portal:Isle of Wight has an interesting architecture that might have a future if hierarchical geographical portals are the wave of the future (which they probably are not). The portal does not use its own subpages.  The portal instead uses two embedded lists that are subpages of Portal:South East England, which in turn has lists of general articles and of biographies for each of the counties in the region.  (Isle of Wight is an island county.)  There are 8 biographies and 17 general articles. This is an interesting architecture that should be reviewed by anyone who is interested in improved architectures for portals.  The articles are referenced from the list and not content-forked and so do not suffer from subpage rot.
 * 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 view rate cited by the nominator is for a one-month period. In the first half of 2019, the viewing rate is slightly but not much better, at | 6 average daily pageviews, with a maximum of 14 daily viewings, and, as noted, there were days that the portal was not viewed.
 * Previous experience has been that counties in England seldom sustain portals, but this portal, for a popular vacation location, is even more disappointing than one might have expected.
 * The primary problem with this portal is, as noted by the nominator, an extremely low viewing rate.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:23, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Has abysmally low page views and is about a very narrow topic. Clearly not wanted by readers and is abandoned or near-abandoned, so just delete it. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:15, 12 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep I actively maintain this portal and as a county it is of sufficient scope for a portal to exist. Wikipedia is not a commercial advertising driven website so page views are irrelevant. If you have a problem, try the talk page first instead of heading straight to MfD, just like any other content on Wikipedia. WaggersTALK  11:15, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The portal is not actively being maintained based on what I have noted in the bullet points in this deletion nomination. The introduction has also been copied and pasted from the article to the portal. Pkbwcgs (talk) 12:48, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes of course the introduction is the same, that's because it's the same topic. That's standard procedure. What would you suggest it says instead? As for maintenance, those are content issues not existential issues to which the answer is either WP:SOFIXIT or raise the matter on the talk page, not jump straight to deletion. W</b><b style="color:#97E">a</b><b style="color:#86D">g</b><b style="color:#75C">ge</b><b style="color:#83C">r</b><b  style="color:#728">s</b><small  style="color:#080">TALK  10:21, 15 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:South East England. Alternative suggestions welcome. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:02, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Narrow topic, unwanted by readers.  Pageviews in the 12 months to the end of October 2019 show an average of only 5 views per day, but the graph shows a steady decline in recent months, so I checked August–October 2019, and the daily average is only 2 views/day in Aug–Oct. (Not a typo: the average really is just two: 199 views in 92 days, including a one-day spike of 21 views on 15 October). That's below even the usual background noise level of editors poking about.
 * The last 8 months of portal MFDs have repeatedly shown that sub-national portals rarely thrive, and this one is no exception. Half of the 50 United States state portals have already been deleted, having failed to attract readers and editors, and the same has happened in most other countries. The Isle of Wight had an estimated 2018 population of only 141,538, making it a whole order of magnitude smaller than the deleted US state portals, so it's no wonder it has failed to attract readers and editors.
 * There simply aren't enough decent-quality articles here to sustain a portal: only 2 FA-Class Isle of Wight-related articles and 7 GA-Class Isle of Wight-related articles. Even adding in the 12 B-Class Isle of Wight-related articles gives a total of 21 from which to try to create a balanced selection.  That's way too small.
 * The history shows that it has attracted little attention from any editor other than its creator, who claims to still be a maintainer, but left Portal:Isle of Wight/Did you know unchanged for over 11 years until a quick update was done after this MFD opened. The MFD archives are littered with discussions where an MFD nomination prompted a flurry of activity which was not sustained, and the portal came back to MFD years later, so I attach no value to updates done at MFD: they are not an indicator of future maintenance.
 * This portal also seems to have attracted no comment from anyone other than Waggers. The only non-broadcast human post at Portal talk:Isle of Wight is by Waggers, WhatLinksHere from WikipediaTalk namespace shows precisely zero mention on the talk page of any topical WikiProject.
 * Readers are much better served by going to B-class article Isle of Wight. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:38, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete: I've not found any blatant violation of WP:NPOV but I'm concerned that a portal with so little workforce available has been built on "unofficial" DYK not vetted by the process for the main page, such as the one for Isle of Wight Randonnée. I like cyclism and I don't doubt this is indeed an important topic worthy of 20 % or so of the attention on the topic of the Isle of Wight, but it's dangerous to build portals this way. Nemo 12:52, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep - This portal has someone who actively maintains it, why delete something that other editors are willing to improve? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:25, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually:
 * The topic is too narrow, with only 2 FAs and 7 GAs. We don't need a whole portal to display a set of links which would fit on two lines of text.
 * the active maintenance is very limited. As noted above, left Portal:Isle of Wight/Did you know unchanged for over 11 years until a quick update was done after this MFD opened.
 * there has only ever been one maintainer, with zero WikiProject interest. This is just one editor's personal project. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:00, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.