Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Northern Territory

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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. ‑Scottywong | talk _ 18:02, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Northern Territory


Long-abandoned mini-portal, which is almost unread. It consists of four 12-year-old redundant content forks, a pair of 12-years reports masquerading as "news", and a trio of 11-year-old DYKs.

Created in 2007 by, who last edited in 2018. The lead of WP:POG says Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained. Seb26's last edit to any portal was in March 2008.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Northern Territory shows a modest set of subpages. The list is a bit misleading, because Portal:Northern Territory/Selected article/4, article/6, article/7, and article/8 are all blank. Of he non-blank pages:
 * There are only 4 selected articles. Portal:Northern Territory/Selected article/1, article/2, article/3, article/5. All are completely unchanged since their creaion in 2007, apart from driveby WP:Unlinkdates edits.
 * Portal:Northern Territory/News displays the same two items as in December 2007. No year is displayed with either entry, so these 12 year-old items are presented as if they were from Dec 2018, i.e. 7 months old.
 * Portal:Northern Territory/Did you know displays 3 items. At least two of them do appear to be products of WP:DYK, which is a welcome change from the forests of fake DYKs on so many other portals. However, the set of entries is unchanged since 2009.  Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this ten-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". However, the generally abysmal viewing figures for portals means that "broad" needs to be read as "very broad". This portal has had zero maintainers and almost no readers, so it's clearly nowhere near broad enough.

In January–June 2019, Portal:Northern Territory got an average of only 9 pageviews per day, compared with a daily average for the head article Northern Territory of 1,194 daily views. In other words, readers prefer the head article by a ratio of 129:1.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. And in this case, the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the C-Class head article Northern Territory, which is is a much better showcase and navigational hub.

As with many portals, this one is a failed solution in search of a problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:25, 26 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete – I concur with the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl, and had been considering nominating this portal myself. I am attaching metrics on portals on Australia and its states and territories:

As can be seen, regional portals in general, especially below the national level, are not well-maintained. This portal appears to have been assessed, but the assessment evidently focused only on the absence of blatant errors and not on the absence of content. A quick look at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Northern_Territory would lead one to think that there are eight articles, but some of them are blank, perhaps because the portal wasn't finished. This portal should be deleted, but if another editor wants to develop a portal that does not rely on subpages, which are a failure, they know where Deletion Review is. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:45, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal is terrible.Catfurball (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please keep: Could we please have a moratorium on deletions of regional portals?  These reginal portals can be rebuilt and updated.  This is just creating chaos with no benefit to Wikipedia.  Please see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals for the current impact.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 23:09, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No moratorium. Thee abandoned portals have been wasting the the time and energy of`readers and editors for years. They don't just fail to add value; they actively mislead, by providing outdated or incomplete information.
 * The only chaos here is in Buaidh's imagination and in the list of redlinks which he has created. Wikipedia is significantly improved by the removal of unused, misleading, badly-designed portals which readers avoid.
 * It is very easy to to make glib statements that portals can be rebuilt and updated. The reality is that maintaining them requires a lot of ongoing work by a lot of editors, and in face of the evidence of long-term neglect it is utterly implausible to simply state that this can end.  There might be some credibility to such a statement if there was evidence of a team of active maintainers had formed, but there is no such evidence. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:38, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

Categories, portals, navboxes etc are not content: they are navigational tools. It is worrying that this crucial distinction needs to be explained so often to editors who get very indignant at the notion that we shouldn't continue to waste readers' time by luring them to a navigational device which has been abandoned for a decade as a rusty shell. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:42, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep - per WP:NEGLECT, I am also voting keep as I see no value in WP:IDONTLIKEIT comments. Wikipedia is a work in progress and the territory consists of a large part of Australia. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:33, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * @Knowledgekid87, Wikipedia's content is a work-in-progress. This is not encyclopedic content; it is a failed and abandoned navigational device.  WP:NEGLECT is all about articles, and this is not  an article. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:25, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * There is nothing in WP:NEGLECT that says that it is confined to articles. What do you mean by "content", and where are you citing your information? If it is on Wikipedia then it is by definition "content". - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:15, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The lack of a specific exclusion doesn't alter fact the language is all about articles.
 * There does not appear to be a consensus on the matter if it needs to be explained often without going into specifics. WP:BLP1E for example, only applies to living people as that is more straightforward. To be fair I think more time has been wasted with these discussions, the notion of "wasted time" is also a matter of personal preference. For some, going out to see a movie would be another person's waste of time. It hence bothers me a bit that most of these discussions are coming down to WP:IDONTLIKEIT per comments like "Delete this portal is terrible.Catfurball (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2019 (UTC)". - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:53, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * @Knowledgekid87, as you well know, Catfurball was commenting in response to two screenfulls of evidence above. Your dismissal ';s comment as "IDONTLIKEIT" is achieved only by your omission of that crucial context, and as such it is a shameful misrepresentation. Please clean up your conduct. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:01, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * What are you talking about? That was their deletion rationale... if it were on any other thing then it would be given no weight as being a personal opinion. You are not addressing my points here. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:03, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * On the contrary, Knowledgekid87, I am addressing them directly. Your substantive point is your misrepresentation of the status and content of essays. Your subsidiary point is your misrepresentation of the contributions to the discussions by other editors. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:12, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment in response to the call by User:Buaidh and others for a moratorium on the deletion of regional portals: Please discuss this at Village Pump where I have tried to mention the issue of regional portals.  I will personally respect any request for a moratorium to allow discussion of the status of regional portals if it is made there via an RFC.  (I cannot speak for any other editor.)  I will ignore any moratorium request that is not made there.  There have been many comments that nations, states of the United States, and other regions should have portals, but, until now, no serious discussion of the guidelines for such portals.
 * The statement that these portals should be kept so that they can be updated and rebuilt is silly. Most of them use thditor e failed paradigm of partial copies of pages, and if they are rebuilt, should be rebuilt from scratch with dynamite.  Besides, if no one is maintaining them, why does it make sense to expect that Godot will upgrade them?
 * As to whether they do any harm, the answer is that many of them present no-longer-correct information, such as about heads of state who have been replaced either democratically or undemocratically. Obsolete information in portals is worse than in articles, because most editors do not know how to update portal subpages. They are not harmless, and no one is about to fix them.
 * Any editor who wants to propose that regional portals should have a special status may do so at WP:POG2019RFC.
 * Robert McClenon (talk) 00:21, 31 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment – No prejudice against future re-creation of a curated, maintained portal with an adequate amount of content. The topic itself meets the WP:POG criteria for topical broadness relative to the amount of coverage it has on English Wikipedia. See Category:Northern Territory and its subcategories for an overview of available coverage about the topic. North America1000 13:31, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Strong prejudice against re-creation. @NA1K now knows very well that WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".  I have absolutely no doubt that NA1K is aware of this, because it has been drawn to NA1K's attention in dozens of discussions.
 * So NA1K's attempt to define POG's criteria for topical broadness without mentioning the requirement for "large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" is clearly no accidental omission or oversight. It has been repeated by NA1K on so many occasions that it is unquestionably a pattern of deliberate deceit, a systematic effort to dishonestly misrepresent established guidelines.
 * The fact is that this topic has been shunned for a decade by both readers and editors, so it clearly fails POG.   NAIK's campaign of lies, deceit and obfuscation should not obscure the fact that a rebuilt portal would still fail the POG's requirements. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:38, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No, my opinion is not "deceit', it's my opinion. My comment is worded as just that, a comment, not an !vote. Calm down already. I feel that it's possible for a well-made, curated portal with lots of useful content to be made, which may then serve to actually attract readers and maintainers. North America1000 22:54, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I for one am a bit fed up with BrownHairedGirl's response to editors. We are here to work collaboratively, this isn't a WP:BATTLEGROUND, its a deletion discussion. Belittling editors by saying things such as "@NA1K now knows very well" isn't helpful and goes against our civility practices. I also want to point out WP:BRICKS, and WP:PASSIVE. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:51, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Knowledgekid87: NA1K's campaign of repeatedly, deliberately, and deceptively misleading discussions by omitting crucial context from guidelines is disruptive and menadacious. If you share my concern that we should be working collaboratively, please join me in pressing NA1K to start conducting themselves with honesty. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 07:47, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * My other concern is that you seem to be getting frustrated. Even if you are right in what you are saying for these discussions, its how you treat others which is raising concern. I may disagree with you, but I am not belittling you by saying things such as " BrownHairedGirl known by now..." or calling you a "liar". The closing admin will sort these things out and determine who is being honest and who has the weaker argument. If you need a break, then take one as these portals will still be there if or when you want to nominate them for MfD. Discussions like these can last up to a month or more, repairing broken relationships with other editors can take a lot longer than that. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:07, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Kk87, the fundamental problem remains that NA1K is engaging in a campaign to disrupt consensus formation through the systematic use of strategic mendacity. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:12, 5 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. That "the territory consists of a large part of Australia" does not necessarily mean it's a topic sufficiently broad to attract maintainers - as the evidence in the nom (e.g. news not updated for over 10 years) shows. (For info to give an indication of it's importance in the whole of enwp: NT has not been assessed as in the top 10000 vital articles). DexDor(talk) 07:40, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Per the nominators very thorough and deep investigation of this portal. This portal's decade of abandonment means there is a decade of hard evidence that this portal fails WP:POG's requirement that portals be: broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. Australia's Northern Territory is clearly a very narrow subject area, and it is not in the slightest WP:CRYSTALL to predict that readers and maintainers are not going to suddenly fall into this portal like mana from heaven to save it. The only reason we can't say this portal is functionally extinct is because it never really was extent to begin with as a functioning compliment of the encyclopedia. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:42, 5 August 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.