Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Medieval Britain

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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) 06:28, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Medieval Britain

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected, unneeded portal. Tagged as needing improvements since July and no progress.

Ten never-updated selected articles from August 2008. Twelve never-updated selected bios from August 2008. The portal's creator has been inactive since 2013.


 * Errors
 * Two bios and one selected article do not link to their subject.
 * The historicity of Gunnhild, Mother of Kings is treated more skeptically by her Wikipedia entry
 * The entire second paragraph of the Black Death entry is irrelevant and does not exist on the Wikipedia entry. Population of world prior to the disease revised upward.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 09:56, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Abandoned portal filled with errors as listed above. Had an abysmal 10 views per day in the first half of 2019. Time to stop wasting readers' time with this junk. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:01, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analyses by User:Mark Schierbecker and User:Newshunter12. This portal doesn't have a single head article, and so the principle of Write the Article First applies.
 * 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 viewing in the third quarter of 2019 was little better than reported by NH12 at | 12 daily views. (The peak at the end of July may have been influenced by an MFD, but it is not obvious what one it would have been.)
 * The backlinks can be folded to Portal:Middle Ages, because the United Kingdom did not exist in the time in question.
 * Very low readership and no maintenance. Any effort by a maintainer would be better put into writing the article first. Robert McClenon (talk) 4:01, 16 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:Middle Ages. We have no portal covering the island of Great Britain; the closest to that is Portal:United Kingdom, which is both an anachronism (the United Kingdom was created only 307 years after the end the late middle ages in 1500 AD) and has a  different geographical scope (for most of its history the United Kingdom included all of the island of Ireland, and for the period since 1922 it has included that part of the island known as Northern Ireland).
 * As ever, alternative suggestions welcome. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:38, 18 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Per nom and ; portals on topic that have no head article are a concern. Britishfinance (talk) 21:18, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, with prejudice against re-creation. There are multiple fatal problems with this portal.
 * No head article, which a) makes it unclear where the unsourced Portal:Medieval Britain/Intro comes from; b) makes it arguably a synthesis of two distinct topics (Medieval England + medieval Scotland).
 * The nominator and others above have noted the lack of maintenance and the trivially low pageviews.
 * I used WhatLinksHere to look for any signs of interest from topical WikiProjects, but found no discussion on the talk page of any topical project. So I checked user talk pages, and found only a notice of this MFD.
 * There has also has been no discussion ever at Portal talk:Medieval Britain.
 * I cannot find any sign that this portal has ever been anything other than a personal project of its creator, who also created the deleted Portal:Early modern Britain (see WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Early modern Britain). But User:Kaly99's last edit was in March 2013, and the portal has basically been abandoned since then. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 06:05, 20 November 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.