Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lusaka

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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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 00:57, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Lusaka

 * – (View MfD)

An exceptionally bad piece of driveby portalspam. A very poor WP:REDUNDANTFORK of the head article, with no prior manual version.

Its history is so dire that I will tell the story.

This page is all the work of @The Transhumanist (TTH). It was created on 23 August 2018‎ to build its selected articles list off , i.e. the navbox Template:Lusaka, which was an abysmal affair consisting almost entirely of links to categories and to sections of the head articles. When the navbox was properly was cleaned up on 14 December 2018 by, it contained only two links: Lusaka Province and Timeline of Lusaka. Those two links will have been the full set of "selected articles".

It remained like that through a total of 9 edits by TTH, the last on 10 November 2018‎. During all this time it was eligible for speedy deletion per WP:P2.

Four months after this portal's creation on 30 Dec 2018, implemented the "delete" closure of TFD debate on Template:Lusaka. That of course broke the portal, so Plastikspork tweaked it to use instead the head article Lusaka.

That was a good faith attempt to rescue something after the deletion, and I am sure that Plastikspork was unaware of possibly ill effects. But unfortunately it meant that the portal was now set to hoover up the first link in any list item on the head article. And that includes the list of twin towns: Dushanbe, Beirut, Los Angeles, Izhevsk.

So since 30 December 2018, the full set of 7 "selected" articles on Portal:Lusaka consists of: the politicians Rupiah Banda and Michael Sata, the African-American Jet (magazine) ... and 4 cities which are not even in Africa, never mind Zambia, let alone part of Lusaka. Try it yourself.

And if at any point in the 8 months since this page's creation the portalspammer @The Transhumanist did even a quick flick through of the selected articles, the obvious folly of the results didn't prompt him to fix anything. That's why I call this "driveby portalspam". Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:46, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete with fire. When I saw this pop up on TTH's talkpage I checked the page before checking the nomination. Jet Magazine showed as the featured article which was a "what the hell" moment. Then I scrolled to a Russian then a Central Asian city. I looked at the code and saw it was (once) based on a template (but the word template is commented out which leaves the head article as the source) - which makes no sense because who would put those pages on a template about an African city. Relying on the head article pulls all kinds of random stuff. For example I was able to add Newspaper as a featured article for Portal:Kathmandu by wikilinking the word in the head article. This perfectly shows how actions far outside the portal (like deleting a template or adding a wikilink) will bust the portals without any edit to the portal that alerts any watchers. The watchers have to visit and read the portal regularly which is the exact opposite of the promised self maintaining status we were promised. I watch 40,000 article pages mostly because of my AfC activity and could, if I needed to, revert anything that broke those pages. A person could watchlist all the automatic self breaking portals and you would never know when they automatically break because of changes to the templates and pages they are based on. Legacypac (talk) 04:03, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Basing a portal on all the wikilinks in an article is such a poor idea that it makes all the other auto-methods look sane. No prejudice to a hand-curated portal, when enough content is available, although our African content is currently woeful. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:33, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete  - Automated portal,  0 subpages, created 2018-08-23 02:38:13 by User:TTH, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality: Portal:Lusaka. Pldx1 (talk) 08:18, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete because it is not just pointless, but misleading. It is almost devoid of coverage, the selected articles include totally irrelevant links and the "need help?" link is not the place to go for questions on Lusaka. Dear oh dear, this is the kind of rubbish that gives portals a bad name.Bermicourt (talk) 14:51, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not enough content to support a portal.-- Auric   talk  15:17, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Another portal that requires a silver bullet. This isn't a zombie portal, but it is some sort of shape-shifting monster that wanders between continents and apparently eats human brains like a zombie.  I won't repeat what the previous editors have said about really bizarre links.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:43, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Can someone check the weather at the South Pole to see if there is snow? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:43, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Tracking category: to help identify other portals which may have similar issues, I have hacked Module:Excerpt slideshow (again!) to populate Category:Automated portals with article list built using eponymous article.
 * It will probably take between 6 and 24 hours for the category to full populate. Current live population count = . -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:11, 26 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per all. John M Wolfson (talk) 19:26, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: WP:DYNAMITE case, approaching P2.    SITH   (talk)   22:46, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. @Paul McDonald has objected several times to me calling TTH "the Portalspammer". So please look at this portal, Paul. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:40, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * No matter how bad a Wiki portal/article/file/whatever may be, that is never an excuse to be abusive toward the editor who created it. No content is so bad that it should give others free license to violate the Five pillars.  Delete the page?  Sure.  Do so in a way that you can "Respect your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree."--Paul McDonald (talk) 19:21, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Paul, this is a spammed portal. Mass-created junk.  The person who created all this is the portalspammer. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:25, 4 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.