Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Korea

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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:  keep. Technically, this is somewhere between "keep" and "no consensus" as it doesn't seem that the delete arguments have convinced many people or are so overwhelmingly compelling to override the keep arguments. Perhaps the portal needs some maintenance (as some of the delete arguments assert) but that can be done outside of the MFD process Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:51, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:North Korea

 * – (View MfD)

At Portal:Briarcliff Manor, New York we have a portal where 25 [articles] have their leads incorporated in the portal and are maintained up todate. For those who know nothing about Briarcliff Manor, New York, this village started its life circa 1820, its superficy is 15 km2, and its population was 7,867 in the 2010 census. Since North Korea covers an area of circa 120,540 km2, has circa +25,000,000 inhabitants and an history that lasts at least from Goguryeo, a decent portal about North Korea should encompass $$ 25\, articles \times \frac{20\, centuries}{2\, centuries}\times \frac{120 540\, km^2}{15\,km^2}\times \frac{25000000 \, inhab}{7867\, inhab}\approx 6\,10^9\, articles $$

Even if someone was arguing that ONE Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard is as worth as any THOUSAND random North Koreans, and that any cm^2 in Briarcliff Manor is as worth as any m^2 of foreign land, there should be 600 articles incorporated in this so called Portal:North Korea. But there are only 12 of them:
 * The Korean War
 * The Chaplain–Medic massacre, 1950, Tunam, South Korea
 * The Hill 303 massacre, 1950, near Taegu, South Korea
 * The Battle of Nam River, 1950, part of the Battle of Pusan Perimeter
 * The Battle of Osan, 1950, south of the South Korean capital Seoul
 * The Battle of Taejon, 1950, (Taejon is 50 minutes south of Seoul by KTX)
 * The 766th Independent Infantry Regiment, NKPA, disbanded 1950
 * The Art of the Cinema, 1973, written by Kim Jong-il.
 * The 6th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), 1980
 * The 2009 North Korean nuclear test
 * The Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang).
 * 'The Interview', a 2014 American political satire targeting Kim Jong-un

In other words, 7/12 are about Korean War (1950-1953). Surprisingly, all of the battles chosen occurred south of the DMZ of nowadays. Nothing about the capital Pyongyang, except from a snippet about the Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang). This snippet is so outdated that, from May 2013 to April 2019, it was saying the hotel is scheduled to open partially in July or August 2013. Never heard of [| The eight scences of Pyongyang] ? 'Watching the full moon from Pobyok Cliff' is a marvelous and modern view. Nothing about any other North Korean town. What a shame for a portal pretending to be about North Korea.

And we have also 6 biographies
 * Kim Il-sung (1912 – 1994)
 * Kim Jong-il (1941 – 2011)
 * Kim Jong-un (born 1983)
 * Jo Ki-chon (1913 – 1951) was a Russian-born North Korean poet.
 * Han Sorya (1900 – 1970) head of the Korean Writers' Union, purged 1962
 * Kim Pyong-il (born 1954), surviving son of Kim Il-sung.

As if nobody was worth noticing except the three Kim and three marginal people. Nothing about the people itself nor about Economy of North Korea nor about any other North Korean topic. What a shame for a portal pretending to be about North Korea.

When looking onto the details, this empty thing is not really a portal about North Korea. This so called portal is top and foremost a way to advertise the 'Great Articles' that were promoted by the now defunct WikiProject Korea. As these articles are
 * 44 about Korean War
 * 14 about mostly foreign topics
 * 21 about K-pop and dramas
 * 09 about North Korea
 * 13 about South Korea
 * 02 about (marginal) pre-1945 people

the emptiness of this portal about North Korea should not remain a surprise.

As a consequence, this quite empty thing pretending to be a portal about a long lasting country should be deleted. This would be the most simple decency with regard to our readers (and with regard to all Koreas, from past and present). This portal has never been developed to reach an acceptable size and become something that could pretend to be a navigation tool about North Korea. The sparcity [|Korea|Portal:South_Korea|Portal:North_Korea|South_Korea|North_Korea wmflabs] of the page views related to the three Korea portals largely explains why this emptiness has persisted along the years. Obviously this deletion is to be decided without prejudice of (1) another portal devoted to Korean War (1950-1953) --at least, the articles are existing-- or (2) the apparition of some Heaven's Soldiers that will step forward and build a decent portal. Pldx1 (talk) 13:42, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Question - Have User:Kanghuitari and User:WhisperToMe bee notified? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:44, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I was unaware of this discussion until now. Anyway, I can understand the ENwiki community wanting higher quality portals. This is something that should be encouraged. I think the best way to do this is to make it much easier to make a great portal, and that means having a process in which a user can choose a series of articles of a good enough quality that can make up the said portal.
 * Re: "20 / 2 centuries" I believe in fact "North Korea" refers to strictly the post-1945 state with the capital in Pyongyang, so the history would be measured in decades, not so much centuries.
 * WhisperToMe (talk) 16:49, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Whether Pyongyang should be deleted is beyond the scope of this MFD. (The article on Pyongyang should not be deleted.) Robert McClenon (talk) 16:48, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep these are content issues, not deletion issues.--Paul McDonald (talk) 18:49, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment WP:WikiProject Korea courtesy talkpage notified. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:02, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - The arithmetic makes no sense. However, this is yet another poorly implemented portal that needs to be swept away, with the possibility that someone will develop a reasonable portal in accordance with future portal guidelines.  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:08, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - This portal is so empty that it cannot have any content issue. The portal guideline says explicitly that:
 * Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create. Examples are given of lack of maintenance (due mainly to a lack of readers)
 * A portal helps to browse on a particular subject. This toy sized 'portal' helps nothing. Far better navigation tools are provided by the main article North Korea, by Index of North Korea-related articles, and by Template:Korea topics. Trying to distract reader's attention to this useless thing is (1) shameful in concept (2) unsuccessful in fact (how many page views ?). And we have to stop this experiment, when conclusion is reached.
 * Pldx1 (talk) 22:05, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment. Let's pretend for a minute that we have my proposed two-stage portal deletion process in action. The nominator has properly brought an important national portal to the community's attention for review. Their assessment of the portal (outside the numerical hyperbole) seems broadly accurate, but it looks as if a few items have recently been added (the ones I checked were on the 20th, pre-dating this nomination). Current stats:
 * There are 15 selected articles, 6 bios, 16 images and 2 sets of DYKs.
 * As an ITN regular, I know there has been a good deal of interest in N. Korea and its leader recently, which is in no way mentioned in this portal, which draws its news from Wikinews and is 11 months out of date.
 * The portal is being worked on. It currently exceeds (and at the date of the nomination probably met) the minimum 20 total articles. The news is out of date and probably needs to be drawn from somewhere else. Conclusion: Keep and improve further, bearing in mind that the 20 articles is a minimum, and a broad area such as a nation should have lots more than the minimum available. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:52, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I've updated the News section to draw automatically from the Current events portal rather than manually from Wikinews. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 10:51, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
 * That's a big improvement. You might want to take more items (and shift one of the boxes underneath to the other column) as it's now only covering a very short time-frame! Espresso Addict (talk) 11:22, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Are you really saying that adding
 * 13. Smoking in North Korea
 * 14. Wearing Kim badges in North Korea
 * 15. Beer in North Korea
 * transformed a 18 pages portal into a portal broadly covering this country ? Moreover, I seems that the in the news section advertises the news agencies rather providing a navigation inside of Wikipedia. 'just saying'.   Pldx1 (talk) 20:46, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
 * No, I'm saying the addition of several articles converted it from not technically meeting the absolute minimum (depending on which nomination date one considers) to exceeding it. The news looks fine, and I don't really understand Pldx1's comment on that. The external links are short references and the items have wikilinks. The format is used in Portal:Current events. I didn't like the use of the Daily Mail but I have now extirpated that at source. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:30, 30 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep (copying my vote and comment to deletion nominations for North Korea and South Korea) - Many of the portals have low pageviews. It feels like North and South Korea are being banished. Did someone mention a goal to automate or revamp the whole portal process, which appears to be antiquated and rarely used. Here are a few examples for Daily Average pageviews (latest 20):
 * China:134
 * Japan:102
 * North Korea:51
 * South Korea:30


 * Egypt:27
 * Namibia:12
 * Sudan:20
 * South Africa:42


 * Canada:59
 * Cuba:24
 * Mexico:42
 * United States: 222


 * France:88
 * Germany:97
 * Ireland:58
 * United Kingdom:147--Bonnielou2013 (talk) 00:08, 28 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete Joke of a portal. CoolSkittle  (talk) 14:09, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Let us try a detailed evaluation of one of those snippets used in the window "North Korea in the news". The snippet says:
 * April 24, 2019 (Wednesday). Asia Press reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered the execution by firing squad of four foreign ministry officials after the failure of his February Hanoi summit with U.S. President Donald Trump after accusing them of "selling information to the U.S." before the summit. (Daily Mail) (Yahoo News).
 * - How this sausage was made? The code of the portal calls Transclude selected current events. From the code of this template, the snippet is an extract of Portal:Current events/2019 April 24. Reading the history, the snippet was added by an IP, and then FOUR users removed and then re-added the Daily Mail link. It simply seems that no one ever opened these two sources. Yahoo says The executions ... have not been verified. Daily Mail says Despite the reports ... the claims have not yet been verified. In fact, both are only saying that Asia Press claimed its reporter spoke to a trade official who was told the rumour about the executions. And don't look at WP to know something about [Asia Press]: there is no article about this agency.
 * - This is the process that User:Espresso Addict recommends to improve further. It rather seems that deleting all this mess will be the improvement deserved by both Koreas and our readers as well. Pldx1 (talk) 18:40, 30 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep unless we want to deprecate portals entirely (which a different question) then a medium-sized country is a perfectly good topic for one. This isn't a navbox portal and the selected articles I got were all relevant. I disagree that the Korean War is out of scope, it was a military conflict involving North Korea and one which defines the country to the present day. The fact that a battle didn't take place in contemporary North Korea doesn't mean anything. I'm not seeing a good rationale for deletion here.  Hut 8.5  21:48, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep Paul McDonald put it succinctly: these are content issues, not deletion issues. Deletion is about whether something should exist, not about the quality/content of what's there (unless it's blatant spam/vandalism obviously). WaggersTALK  09:06, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Portal of ideal scope, is actively maintained (by me, as it happens), and contains no insurmountable issues in design or execution. I've already explained some of the design choices here. As this portal is actively maintained, you are more than welcome to suggest improvements on the portal talk page. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:38, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Dear active maintainer. Did You Know that this portal is displaying an hearsay of an hearsay from DailyMail/Yahoo News but omits to mention Despite the reports ... the claims have not yet been verified ? Moreover, Did You Know that... "the 7th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), the ruling party of North Korea, was held on 6–9 May 2016" ? Pldx1 (talk) 18:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * If that's true (and I'm not saying that it isn't) then just fix the content.--Paul McDonald (talk) 19:25, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Dear User:Paulmcdonald. Your post just above is a great explanation of the pitiful state of this portal (and of so many other). You cannot be arsed to check if the two more failures I have put the finger on are indeed failures or not. And obviously, you cannot be arsed to fix the content by your self. You and yourself want to keep... and moreover you want that me and myself are doing the job. What a great joke... but also a great proof that the only way to fix this mess is to delete this portal, deprived of readers and deprived of people doing the maintenance diligences. Without prejudice of a full restart by a team decided to deliver something between Portal:University of Pittsburgh and Portal:San Francisco Bay Area. Pldx1 (talk) 10:38, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I did not say that you have to be the one to fix it. There's no reason to get upset.  Any content that violates policy should be deleted.  The only thing I can figure out that's left is that the nominator just wants more content.  It looks like the nominator is calling for 610^9 (or is that 6 x 10^9?) more articles, but that seems a bit much since that's way more articles than  are in the English edition of Wikipedia.  I confess it will take me a long time to meet that standard.  Hopefully I'm misunderstanding that--Paul McDonald (talk) 12:12, 3 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep for now. The nomination is very odd. I'm not sure that I follow the logic, let alone see a case being made for deletion. A further, less esoteric nomination, might persuade me differently, but I can't support this. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - Dear User:BrownHairedGirl. When evaluating a portal, I think that a first question to ask is: what could be the size of a decent portal providing a decent navigation in the corresponding topic. This is another instance of a Fermi problem, whose original statement was "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?". My guess was circa 600 snippets for NK (and thus 600 for SK). Maybe to be divided between 300 for NK proper, 300 for SK proper and 600 for pre-1945 Korea. But if you prefer saying: North Korea proper is at least as important as cricket, thus at least 300 and the other figures accordingly, I have no problem with that. In any case, a toy sized portal with at most 18 snippets is only that: a kid's toy... or a slap in the face of all Koreas, and in the face of our readers as well. And this is not all. This specific portal, the Portal:North Korea'one is far from being maintained (at a level above a simple lip service). Nobody has any intent to do anything against displaying an hearsay of an hearsay from DailyMail/Yahoo News but omitting to mention Despite the reports ... the claims have not yet been verified ? Nobody has any intent to do anything about the snippet that says As of 2015 it has been the last party congress held, despite party rules requiring a quadrennial meeting. It could seem cruel to insist on this simple fact that finding a snippet in a set of 15 should not be that difficult, but this is nevertheless a fact. Moreover, there is no surprise here. You cannot hope any crowd sourcing when you don't have the required crowd. But, to be sure, this not the end of the world. There are so few readers facing this fake portal, and part of them are only crawling robots. Pldx1 (talk) 12:33, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Fixed the 6th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea snippet. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 17:17, 6 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.