Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Kandahar

 __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:  delete. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 00:45, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Kandahar

 * – (View MfD)

Narrow topic, fails WP:POG guidance that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

This should be a broad topic. Kandahar is a city of over 500,000 people, and one of the oldest known human settlements. Wikipedia should have lots of substantive articles on this long history, but for all the usual systemic bias reasons, en.wp's coverage is very thin, both in quantity and quality.

I did some checks on what's available. Excluding articles tagged as stubs and Category:Kandahar detention facility detainees, there are 20 biographies and 22 non-biographical articles (Lists on the talk page). However, most of these articles are start-class, and a significant chunk have cleanup tags.

Here's WikiProject Afghanistan's rating for the 42 articles:
 * 10 not tagged
 * 4 tagged but unassessed
 * 7 stub-class
 * 16 start-class
 * 5 C-class: Kandahar, Kandahar International Airport, Old Kandahar, Battle of Kandahar (2011), Mughal–Safavid War (1649–53)
 * 0 B-class, GA-class, A-class, or FA-class

I'm sure the assessments are out of date, but even so that's clearly a small and poor set to build a showcase for. And out-of-date assessments are fairly good indicator of under-maintained articles.

We should build the content first, and only then make a portal to show it off. This one is cart before the horse.

Note that when I found this portal, it acknowledged only one selected article. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Kandahar found three more, which I have added.  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:04, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I have doubts as to whether the city is an appropriately broad topic, in spite of its age and of the recent battles. This portal does not make the case anyway.  As BHG says, built the content first.  For some reason, the portal platoon thinks that portals are a way to encourage the creation of content.  Maybe content-building in general should be slowed down, with 5.7 million articles, and we should be improving existing content.  In any case, this one is not useful.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:34, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Kandahar in principle is a decent topic for a portal; as the nominator notes, it's among the most significant cities in the world historically. I think one has to be very cautious using project assessments, as they are often laughably out of date. Some of the start assessments might even date from before C-class existed. I spot-checked a double handful of the links provided on the talk page at random, and 8/10 were broadly start to C class, without major issues, and with occasional flights towards possible B class eg Nur Jahan, which was tagged as start, but looks B class and was used last year at main-page OTD (I have reassessed for those projects I felt capable of doing so). By the way, 2009 Kandahar bombing & Operation Baawar are clear stubs and project tagged as such. The only way one can find out if this is a portal-worthy topic, would be to investigate in far more detail than either I or BrownHairedGirl have done. All that said, however, the existing portal has only 4 articles, 1 image, and a couple of DYKs that look to have been made up, rather than harvested from the main-page archives. Unless someone is prepared to take this over and maintain it, I'm leaning delete. Has the Wikiproject been informed? Espresso Addict (talk) 08:04, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for catching those two, Espresso Addict. They weren't tagged as stubs on the face of the article, which was my basis for excluding stubs (because tags on the face of the article are more likely to be removed if no longer applicable than ratings on the talk page).  I have now tagged those articles with Afghanistan-stub, and struck them from the list.
 * That leaves us with only 40 non-stub articles in total, of variable quality, and a WikiProject which is clearly not proactive in maintaining and assessing them. So I am surprised by your equivocation about deletion. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 11:43, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I always lean towards keeping anything that isn't actively problematic. If a good-faith maintainer were to come here and make reasonable promises, I'd be minded to throw them a rope. But if no-one comes, I'm comfortable with deletion, as indicated by bolding it above. If I really wanted to vote to keep, I would do so explicitly. Espresso Addict (talk) 11:52, 30 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - Old draft of a portal, 19 subpages, created 2017-01-28 16:56:13 by User:Af420. Quite empty, to be deleted to make place to a decent portal, if a team wants to gather and create one such decent one. Portal:Kandahar. Pldx1 (talk) 12:16, 3 May 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.