Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Mesopotamia

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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) 01:12, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Mesopotamia

 * – (View MfD)

Stillborn portal. This portal is almost entirely the creation of a blocked user and their sockpuppets in 2008.

Twenty-four never-updated selected articles created in April–July 2008. Many of these would qualify for WP:G5.

Five key topics created in May 2019. There are 16 other key topics that are not in prose form, but are not transcluded.

This portal was moved from Portal:Ancient Near East in April 2019. I identified selected articles Battle of Kadesh and Phoenicia as two topics that aren't super relevant under the new scope, though one could make the case for either. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 11:24, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator. The content forked-subpages are comprehensively abandoned.  Obviously, in this case there are no BLPs involved, but those ancient content forks reflect a much earlier state in the development of the articles.
 * In other MFDs some defenders of portals have tried to argue that such abandonment doesn't matter much for historical topics, because the past doesn't change.
 * That view misunderstands both history and Wikipedia. History is not static. Our knowledge and understanding of history is constantly evolving, as new evidence is discovered, and as new scholarship re-evaluates existing evidence. For one example of how our understanding evolves, see Historiography of the causes of World War I.
 * Wikipedia is a work-in-progress. The early versions of an article may be short and patchy. Their subsequent development is often uneven, as material is added on one aspect of the topic, or one view of the topic. These developments happen erratically, reflecting the interests and expertise of individual editors. Our better articles (esp those of FA or GA-class) have often been completely rewritten by someone with a scholarly overview of the topic.
 * The structure of Wikipedia articles also changes. Topics may be split, or existing splits rearranged, so the choice of wikilinks made a decade ago may be wildly out-of-step with the current organisation of Wikipedia coverage in that topic area.
 * And of course, articles may be created on topics which had previously been neglected or even omitted.
 * All those factors mean both that:
 * the selection of articles made a decade ago may no longer be appropriate, and
 * the content which was forked ten years ago may be way out of date, even though the topic is a thousand years old.
 * That's why portals need ongoing maintenance. Not just tweaking of their presentation and reworkings of the abominable Rube Goldberg machine structures which they nearly all use. Not even additions to the list by the prolific editor who runs between wildly disparate topics in which they have zero expertise, adding more articles while never explaining their choice; their manic listmaking is neither curation nor maintenance. Portals need actual curation by editors with genuine expertise in the subject area, and our readers are as ill-served by the hyperactivity of the ignorant as by the neglect of the experts.
 * In this case, there is no sign that anyone wants to maintain the portal, let alone anyone with expertise in the topic. We do have a WP:WikiProject Ancient Near East, but there has been no mention of this portal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ancient Near East since a post in September 2009.  The last human post at Portal talk:Mesopotamia was  a technical issue in April 2015.
 * Whatever the merits of the topic, the portal cannot be sustained without knowledgeable maintainers. And we don't have them. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:48, 3 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - The statement that the past does not change is true but useless. That statement is dangerous if it is used to mean that articles or portals on historical topics do not need to be updated to reflect current scholarship.  It is less obviously stupid to say that, because the past does not change, articles on ancient history do not need to be updated, than to say that, because of the laws of physics do not change, there is no need to update articles on physics to reflect current scholarship.  It is less obviously stupid, but it is still stupid.  What happened in the Trojan War is the same as it was in the time of Herodotus and of Thucydides.  (What Thucydides wrote about it is somewhat more skeptical than what Herodotus wrote about it.  They were both very good scholars.)  The laws of physics are the same as they were in the time of Aristotle, slightly after Herodotus, and in the time of Newton.  Our understanding of the laws of physics is not quite the same as was formulated by Einstein, although that is an improvement over what was formulated by Newton (and what was stated by Aristotle is actually a very good approximation of what is known today).  An article in an encyclopedia in 1790 would have stated that Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mystery.  An article in an encyclopedia in 1840 would have stated that Egyptian hieroglyphics had recently been deciphered.  Our understanding of history evolves just as our understanding of science evolves.  It is non-obviously stupid to think that articles on history do not need to be kept up to date.     Robert McClenon (talk) 02:36, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete - The maintenance on this portal has consisted of renaming it from Portal:Ancient Near East. This is a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic that makes the counting of the lifeboats more difficult, but it appears that with both names, the portal has had |Portal:Ancient_Near_East| 42 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019.  The portal has 24 articles, forked in 2008, and renamed.  It also has 10 empty slots for biographies.
 * The articles have not been updated in ten years.  The knowledge of cuneiform script has advanced in recent decades.  Archeological excavation has continued in parts of Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the ancient Near East in recent decades.  More tragically, there has been destruction of historical sites in the region due to the Syrian Civil War and related conflicts that may affect the accuracy of articles.
 * There is no reason to maintain content-forked portals when content-forking is known to be unreliable. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:51, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Portal has been effectively abandoned since 2008.  Serious concerns here as the topic Mesopotamia is controversial, and both the Portal and Main Article have been heavily vandalized in the past (the Main Article is indefinitely protected to autoconfirmed since 2009); thus forking is even more of an issue here (although, even vandals have also abandoned the Portal, and it is not protected).
 * However, while the Main Article is actively edited, the Portal is abandoned (outside of mechanical edits by TTH and NA1K). What is worse is that the Main Article lies tagged for verification issues (we should consider restricting edits on Portals where the Main Articles are so tagged; it makes no sense otherwise).
 * Again, we see the same pattern of functional obsolesce (i.e. why the Portal is rationally abandoned by editors), with the content of the Portal vastly inferior to the extensive, structured, heavily edited, non-POV'ed, non-forked, Main Article. The other functions of the Portal are just a paste-in of the NavBox and a WikiProject directory of rated articles. Britishfinance (talk) 14:17, 5 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per the nom and @ Brown HairedGirl . The portal has essentially been abandoned since 2008 and was the work of a long discredited editor. It's ancient forked sub-pages are of highly dubious value and it's readily apparent no one with expertise in the topic wants this portal. Just delete it. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:13, 9 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.