Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Olympic Games

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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:  no consensus. There doesn't seem to be a strong consensus either way at this time. Some editors have started fixing the perceived issues with this portal, which is helpful, but if that maintenance doesn't persist beyond this MfD, then this portal might end up back here with a different result. ‑Scottywong | [gossip] || 03:06, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Olympic Games


Abandoned portal. Fifteen selected articles and 10 selected athletes. The last time any of these was updated was in 2012. The Olympics is a very large topic and the selected entries do not represent this area well.

Selected articles:


 * Entry number one was updated in 2006 and 2008


 * 2–3, 5–7 and 9–10 created in 2008, never updated.


 * Four and eight updated for the first and only time in 2010. Eight was about that year's Winter Olympics, so it quickly fell out of date.


 * 11–14 created in 2010, never updated


 * Number 15 created in 2011, never updated

Selected athletes:


 * Nine out of 10 created in 2008. The first one was created in 2009.


 * Numbers 6 and 8–10 were never updated. Two, four and seven were updated for the first and only time in 2010. Three was updated in 2012. Five was updated in 2010 and 2012.


 * Number one was updated four times, the last time was in 2012.

Notable errors:


 * Martin Brodeur hasn't played for the New Jersey Devils since 2014. He no longer plays professionally either.


 * The Tony Marchant entry links to a disambiguation page.


 * Eric Brewer hasn't played for the St. Louis Blues since 2011. He's played for two other teams and retired since the last time this was updated.


 * Barbara Ann Scott died in 2012.


 * Ellen van Dijk hasn't been a track cyclist since 2012.


 * Note - there is a redirect from Portal:Olympics. The backlinks will need attention if portal is deleted. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 00:08, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for seven years and rotted for many more. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had seven years of no maintainers and it had a low 31 views |Portal:Olympics per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article Olympic Games, which is a Featured Article, had 4769 views per day in the same period). Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as seven years of hard evidence shows the Olympic Games are not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 01:47, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Did you actually click and look the portal itself or you are writing similar reasons to delete on every portal nomination? The portal itself looks good and not abandoned at all. It even includes up to date news (missing on most portals). Pelmeen10 (talk) 23:09, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 If this portal is not abandoned, than why was Barbara Ann Scott's 2012 death never noted in her biography article on this portal? This portal is near-decade long abandoned junk, not the incredible masterpiece you are making it out to be. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:16, 25 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep - has potential. Needs fixing, not deletion. Pelmeen10 (talk) 16:49, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Based on your sports themed user page, sports heavy edit history and guideline averse vote, all I see is WP:ILIKEIT. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:42, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * 1000-1500 monthly views are very good, much more than the "deadline of 100" mentioned here, so it definitely is broad subject enough to attract readers. Not to mention, based on your edit history, you don't seem to like portals at all. Pelmeen10 (talk) 22:44, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 Not true. Firstly, that is an essay not a policy or guideline, so it means nothing. Secondly, portal views at MfD are counted on a per day basis, not monthly, which is dishonest because it's easy to mislead others into thinking those are the daily stats. You are also wildly inflating the monthly stat. This portal from Jan-Jun 2019 had 938 views per month, not 1000-1500. During the same period, the head article Olympic Games, which is also a Featured Article, had over 140,000 views per month, so what good is this seven year abandoned portal actually doing besides misleading readers? Fourthly, subjective broadness like you are applying means nothing here. This portal clearly fails WP:POG's broadness guidelines because it lacks large numbers of readers and has no maintainers all for many years. And no, I do not like abandoned junk portals that mislead readers. Do you? Newshunter12 (talk) 03:16, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * You should look stats for longer period (including actual Olympics time) if you claim it's abandoned for 7 years. Comparison to the main article is totally irrelevant. Pelmeen10 (talk) 13:48, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 you mentioned mentioned Consultation on the future of portals, an abandoned discussion where one editor had proposed a target of 100 views per month. That amounts to only 3 views per day, which is risibly low.  Hundreds of portals with many times that view have been abandoned and deleted.  The actual threshold at which portals start to become viable is about 100 views per day.
 * Comparison to the main article is highly relevant. A moderately well-built head article on any topic provides most of the features which a portal sets out to provide: navigation to key topics, preview of articles (it's built-in for non-logged-in readers), and (also for for non-logged-in readers) a built-in image gallery which is vastly better than that in any portal. So unless the portal is demonstrably serving a need which is not met by the head article, it's a waste of time for everyone. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:12, 25 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - I will reply to User:Newshunter12, who has provided good-faith incorrect statistics. The pageview rates of some portals have been complicated because User:UnitedStatesian, also in good faith, had been renaming portals to match head articles, and the renaming sometimes confounds the retrieval of pageview statistics.  (While meant to improve consistency, this cleanup effort, which was not discussed in advance, has hampered the analysis of workload.)  The portal had 29 daily pageviews in Jan-Feb 19, better than most portals, as opposed to 5125 for the article.  In Jan-Dec18, there were an average of 48 daily pageviews, peaking at 341 on 10 Feb 2018 when the 2018 Olympic Games were in progress.  So the pageview rate is not terrible.  Be careful in quoting pageview rates when portals have been renamed.  Also please minimize the renaming of portals.  This rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic makes it more difficult to assess the size of the iceberg hole.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:35, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Robert McClenon Thanks for the tip on page views. I obviously forgot to use both names when researching the page views stat and have updated my post. As to the below question you posed, based on their edit history elsewhere, they are passionate about sports and their vote is just WP:ILIKEIT. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:42, 21 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Question - How and by whom does User:Pelmeen10 propose that this portal be fixed? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:35, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * When a nominator brings out these mistakes, it's easy to fix them. I mean, when you see a article with these kind of mistakes (or one with not 100% up to date info), you would not think to nominate it for deletion. Plus, not every part of a portal needs to be updated very often. Pelmeen10 (talk) 22:26, 24 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep as per Pelmeen10. I would be willing to work on the portal and fix some of those complaints. Considering the coming Summer Olympics 2020 this portal should not be deleted any time soon. And it is a broad subject area considering it is about the biggest sport events in history. We have countless articles about the events and athletes. --Hecato (talk) 15:25, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Hecato pelmeen10's vote and your vote are both pure WP:ILIKEIT, not policy based, nor do they even try to link to supportive policies because there are none. We don't keep anything on Wikipedia based on WP:CRYSTALBALL. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, and this one falls flat. One off maintenance means nothing. This junk portal has been abandoned for seven years and telling readers wildly inaccurate information as explained by the nom. It also has low page views. WP:POG requires portals be about: "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." No guess work is needed. Seven years of hard data show readers and maintainers don't want this portal, which should be deleted per WP:POG. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:49, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Newshunter12 - I didn't ask you how and by whom does User:Pelmeen10 propose that the portal be fixed. ·It also appears that some editors are passionate about portals.  I can understand being passionate about sports.  I don't understand being passionate about portals.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
 * are likely to attract is funny wording, but for the biggest sporting event/movement in to world, it's more likely than in any other sports portal. One minus is that portals are not presented enough to get those "big clicks". Having small icons in the bottom of the article won't do it any favours. But, it still changes when Olympics come closer. I also understand the passion for creating Wikipedia content, but I don't understand the passion to delete. The time for portals in not over, yet. Pelmeen10 (talk) 22:26, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 Portals are not content. Articles have content, while a portals only value is its utility. Subjective grandiosity about this topic means nothing here. Given that this portal is abandoned crud, I certainly hope it's not still around by the time of the next Olympics to lure readers away from the Featured Article Olympic Games. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:16, 25 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete without prejudice to a re-creation that does not use forked subpages. I don't like to have to vote to delete a portal with medium viewing, more than 25 daily pageviews. However, the proponents of keeping the portal have said nothing about how they will improve it, and do not seem to understand that it needs redesign and not mere tweaking or more watching.  The breadth of topic, as measured by the number of articles actually available from the portal (not as an abstraction) is marginal.  The readership is marginal.  The maintenance is sub-marginal.  In view of the interest in this portal, re-creation with an improved design should be permitted. Robert McClenon (talk) 12:41, 22 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep this portal is needed.Catfurball (talk) 23:53, 22 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Catfurball This portal has been abandoned for seven years and had 31 views per day over a six month period, while the Featured Article Olympic Games had 4769 views per day. This junk portal has only 0.65% of the daily views of the head article, which is among the best content on Wikipedia, while the portal is decrepit. There is no obligation to have a portal on anything, and this one clearly fails WP:POG and only serves to lure readers away from the best content on Wikipedia to pure crud. Please reconsider your vote. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:25, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
 * 1000+ page views a month when the next or last Olympic Games are far away means this is one of the most popular portals and the subject itself is notable in every part of the world. May I ask what kind of a policy is the comparison to page views on the main article? Pelmeen10 (talk) 23:15, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 Stop saying things that are untrue. This portal has fewer then 1000 views a month over the long term of 2019 and that is itself a misleading statistic. Views are given in days at MfD. There are also hundreds of portals with higher page views than this one. Do you have a reliable source stating the Olympics is notable in every part of the world and furthermore, what does that have to do with WP:POG's broadness guidelines and this portal's abject failure of them? Newshunter12 (talk) 03:16, 25 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator and per @Newshunter12. This is yet another long-abandoned portal, whose selected articles consist of only outdated content forks which actively mislead the reader. It should have been deleted long ago.
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This has attracted only a mediocre numbers of readers, and almost no maintainers.
 * I also oppose recreation. We have a decade's evidence that editors don't want to maintain this one. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:46, 23 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep Much more than broad enough topic: 169 thousand articles in scope, including over 800 of FA/FL/GA; no possible main article/navbox/cat alternative for effective overview+deep dive presentation of a subject of this scope. The portal had maintainers (the nominator erroneously focuses on just one type of maintenance, ignoring all the other types of maintenance that have taken place in this portal), and now has even more maintainers.  A portal equivalent of WP:HEYMANN applies here: just like we don't delete an article once sources are added, even if it had sat unsourced for many years, we should not immediately delete a portal once good-faith maintainers show up, even if the article had long, long periods of no maintenance in the past. Cat tree and News automatically update without human maintainer. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:43, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @UnitedStatesian: please list the maintainers. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:36, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * User:David Biddulph, User:Hecato and User:UnitedStatesian. UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:23, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * That is NOT a real list of "maintainers". David Biddulph has only ever made one edit to this portal, which was a simple revert. You, @UnitedStatesian, have made a meager two edits to a single biography in over two months on this portal, and Hecato has only ever made a series of simple edits over 34 minutes today automating the portal in a desperate attempt to save this portal from deletion by trying to make it seem like everything is all up to date and well maintained. None of these editors are dedicated maintainers - touching a portal with drive-by edits does not transform an editor into a maintainer, which is an intense long-term undertaking best performed by a team of experts on this topic. Ridiculous false claims such as yours should be given no weight by the closer. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:57, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Maintenance is just a repeated series of "drive-by edits" (what a ridiculous term). And the fact that it only took me a few minutes of editing to fix most of the outdated content problems, shows that maintaining most portals does NOT take a lot of effort. Maintaining it from this point onward will take even less effort than before while the portal is still functionally identical (not an automated portal or whatever you were trying to insinuate here). And the demand for a "team of experts" is a new one. I guess the set of demands expands every time a portal meets the previous set of demands. Maybe in the future maintainers need an Olympic gold medal and a kiss on the cheek from Jimmy Wales before they are allowed to maintain a portal. --Hecato (talk) 13:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The WP:POG guideline sets no minimum that qualifies someone as a "maintainer". And you have woefully underestimated my contributions, all well before this MfD started: I moved the entire portal from Portal:Olympics to Portal:Olympic Games, completely restructured Portal:Olympic Games/Olympic Games news, made numerous top-page edits, etc..  I really cannot stand judgemental editors, especially when they apparently haven't even read the relevant guideline and when their tenure and activity on Wikipedia fall well short of earning them the right to be judgemental.  UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:21, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Relist - It appears that the Keep and Delete are about equal, and it would be useful to get an actual maintenance plan from the advocates, rather than just more handwaving. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:26, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Maintenance Note - I have replaced the texts in the "selected article" and "selected athlete" sub-pages with transclusions of the respective main articles. So no more outdated content there. Most of the sub-pages can probably be removed later, most of them are not really necessary anymore. I have maintained the old sub-page layout for now though. --Hecato (talk) 17:24, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * That's a small improvement, @Hecato, but it still leaves us with:
 * A selection of topics which is a decade out-of-date
 * No agreed basis for selecting new topics
 * No identified maintainers (see the portal page: none signed up)
 * No buy-in from WikiProject Olympics, where there is precisely zero discussion at WT:WikiProject Olympics of whether they want to support and maintain this portal.
 * So all we actually have so far is a few drive by edits from portal fans who appear to have no track record of involvement with Olympic topics. That's a recipe for either a) ongoing decay after the driveby fixes, or b) the portal lingering on as a technically maintained but editorially vacuous plaything of portal fans. Our readers deserve much better than being lured to a so-called "portal" in either of those two states. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:50, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * @BrownHairedGirl: I am just noting changes to the current maintenance status so people new to the discussion can keep track and make informed decisions. Thanks for the to-do-list I guess. I do not remember if I told you this before, but it would be great if you could compress your thoughts a bit more, your posts always take up a lot of space. And not that I care much about it, but the statement that I have not been involved with Olympic Games related articles is false. --Hecato (talk) 18:54, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Hecato - Stating that the above post by User:BrownHairedGirl should have been compressed more was stupid. Apparently you only want comments on the nature of WP:ILIKEIT and WP:IDONTLIKEIT.  If you can't read a concise post by BHG, then perhaps you should avoid taking part in MFDs.  It is true that some of her posts are longer, but that is because, unlike yours, they contain information.  If you can't say anything useful, you have the right to say nothing.  Robert McClenon (talk) 13:24, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * 8 lines is not bulky.
 * You misunderstand my post. That's not a personal to-do list for anyone. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:58, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
 * You can also count me in as a "maintainer" (my kind of topic anyway). But can't see the things BrownHairedGirl insisted under actual guidelines. Pelmeen10 (talk) 20:06, 27 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Maintenance Note - Added two new selected athletes: Elaine Thompson (two times Olympic gold in 2016 summer) and Roberto Luongo (two times Olympic gold in 2010 and 2014 winter; featured article). Added two new selected articles: Quietly Confident Quartet (featured) and Kanthaugen Freestyle Arena (good). --Hecato (talk) 10:08, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * If this was AFD, then Hecato's additions might be relevant. But this is an MFD about a portal, where the issue is long-term maintenance as required by POG ... and a passing flurry of activity does nothing to resolve the actual problem. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 13:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Move to WikiProject Olympics/Portal. It fails as a portal as it does not provide comprehensive or logical or unbiased navigation aid for readers. However, it is valuable for featuring editor achievement in mainspace to editors. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:41, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. As stated in the nomination, this is a very large topic, so there is ample material and interest for a portal.  Constant maintenance is unnecessary because little happens in the Olympic world between games and news items, such as the award of the 2026 Winter Olympics a few months ago, are picked up automatically.  It is not clear that page views should be a deletion criterion but they are higher than most portals and are reasonable considering exclusion from search and the lack of incoming links.  Specific minor faults such as the wikilink to a disambiguation page have already been corrected.  The Topics and Categories sections provide a well organised index to the thousands of related articles.  The excerpts provide an overview of the subject and samples which show no obvious bias.  Certes (talk) 09:06, 27 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.