Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pomerania

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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 | [confabulate] || 22:37, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Pomerania

 * – (View MfD)

Abandoned, static mini-portal on Pomerania, a historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, now split beween Germany and Poland. Very low pageviews, very little content. Redundant to the B-class head article Pomerania, and its two excellent navboxes: Template:Pomeranian history and Template:Pomeranian geography.

Created in July 2013 by, but only as a three-line place-holder: "Let's start with copying the German Portal:Pommern here". That was Horst-schlaemma's last contribution to the portal.

The portal was actually built in July 2017 by, who has done a lot of work on German portals and has pioneered the "mega-navbox" style of portal. This uses extensive navbox-like lists of articles to provide direct access to lots of them, complete with the built-in previews available to non-logged-in readers on all en.wp pages. It's vastly more usable than the predominant but hideous one-subpage-at-a-time model. Sadly, readers seem no more interested in it than in the subpage portals, so in Jan–Jun 2019 this portal averaged only 6 views day, which is barely above background noise.

This structure doesn't have a farm of content-forked sub-pages, so Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Pomerania contains very few content pages, and they have all been abandoned since 2017:
 * Portal:Pomerania/Education, Portal:Pomerania/Geography, Portal:Pomerania/New Articles last edited in the month they were created: July 2017
 * Portal:Pomerania/History: created July 2017. Only edit since is a dab.
 * Portal:Pomerania/Selected Articles created July 2017, only edit since is "fix image options".

And that's it. So this portal has been displaying the same content since it was built, even including the set of only two selected article content-forked into Portal:Pomerania/Selected Articles.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This fails on all four counts:
 * 1)  Broad topic . Depends how you define it.  If the scope is defined as the whole of the history of that area, then it may be big enough ... but that involves framing contemporary topics through a historical region, which now crosses a border.  That isn't just perverse; it could be seen as POV-pushing Pan-Germanism or irredentism.
 * 2)  High readership .  No. 6 views per day is very low.
 * 3)  Lots of maintainers . No. Wholly, abandoned from 2013 to 2017, then one day of edits on 28 July 2017, then abandoned again apart from trivial formatting edits to the portal's main page.
 * 4)  WikiProject involvement . No. There is no WP:WikiProject Pomerania, which means that there is no systematic assessment of Pomerania articles to feed the portal, and no pool of editors to maintain it. The porta's talkpage is tagged for WP:WikiProject Germany, but its talk page+archives contain only one mention of the portal: Bermicourt's 28 July 2017 announcement that the portal had been built, which got no response.

The experience of 6 months of MFDs scrutinising many hundreds of portals has shown that many countries don't even make viable portals, and sub-national regions even more rarely. Despite en.wp's huge systemic bias towards American topics, even many states of the United States had portals which failed. This isn't even a sub-national region; it's a former sub-national region.

This portal was created in good faith, mimicking the German system of portals. But on en.wp it has failed. There is no active WikiProject to support it, and almost no interest in reading it. Readers would be massively better served by being directed to the B-class head article Pomerania. Time to just delete this portal. Since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:39, 23 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Note on backlinks. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if this discussion is closed as delete, I suggest that the backlinks be removed.  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries, but in this case in this case, there are only 11 links from articles, and replacing a link to Portal:Pomerania with either or both of Portal:Poland/Portal:Germany risks POV issues, so I propose to just delete the links. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:18, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. The portal is not 'abandoned' at all and I'm afraid the above are just Aunt Sally criteria based loosely on an obsolete, decade-old guideline which of course it is easy to fail a portal. In fact most of the articles on Wikipedia would fail these criteria. And particularly inappropriate timing while the community discusses the future of portals... BTW the relevant project are the Germany and History WikiProjects. Bermicourt (talk) 16:58, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bermicourt, the evidence of abandonment is there, in the nomination. Strange to see such denialism.
 * The community is not discussing the future of portals. It's having it's time wasted by a false binary proposition which Bermicourt tabled when he was in a sulk about his rant at another MFD being rebutted. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs)
 * PS the criteria used above have been applied in about 800 portal deletion discussions, so calling them an "Aunt Sally" is a bit silly.  And Bermicourt seems not to have noticed that portals are not articles. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:06, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * You need to be careful trying to claim the moral high ground when your response to other editors' views is to use sarcasm and describe them as having a "rant", "sulking", "denialism" and "silly". As an administrator you ought to be a model of fair and reasonable conduct who can argue a point well without resorting to personal attacks and sarcastic comments. Bermicourt (talk) 20:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bermicourt, once again, I took care to make a nomination which explicitly praised you for some things, and which explicitly assumed your good faith. And once again, you replied with incivility and ABF, this time as a scarcastic allegation of bad faith.
 * My model of fair and reasonable conduct does not include endlessly indulging the hostility and rudeness of someone to whom I have repeatedly extended a lot of courtesy, and repeatedly had it throw back at me. So I replied in the tone which you had chosen. If you want to play snippy games like calling a reasoned nomination an "Aunt Sally", I'll reply without my default kindness. And if you choose to finally make an exception to the angrily-lashing-out WP:OWNership stance which you have repeatedly taken at MFD, then we can we can resume to gentler style of dialogue with which I opened. Your call. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:23, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Robert McClenon (talk) 21:20, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl:
 * The portal, as noted, had an average of 6 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019. The article had a median of 612 and a mean of 1113, and attracted 31,714 views on 7 May.  You don't see that with subject-oriented portals.  Users don't want to see portals.  Users want to see articles.
 * The community isn't discussing the future of portals. The community is making a lot of incoherent noise about the future of portals.  The community hasn't bought in to formalizing the "Aunt Sally" guidelines at WP:POG2019RFC, but the community hasn't proposed anything else.  That implies that perhaps we should either use common sense of Wikipedia, or use the common sense of British and Roman philosophers.  Common sense says that 6 daily pageviews, which is no more than BHG measured as noise, isn't worth supporting.
 * I don't see a reason to re-create this portal in the future, because this portal already has a modern design.
 * It's rude to insult Aunt Sally.
 * Delete this junk portal forever.Catfurball (talk) 22:54, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per analysis by BrownHairedGirl and Robert McClenon. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:11, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator,  Brown HairedGirl . Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one on an incredibly narrow topic and with almost no views falls flat. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:45, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. If you take an incredibly narrow view of portals, you will fall victim to that sort of conclusion. These portals are used to generate a one-page overview of current coverage and quality of article topics which is then used to prioritise and create new articles and improve existing ones. So they aren't searching for a problem - they're solving problems. Well at least for those editors working on expanding the sum of human knowledge. Bermicourt (talk) 18:43, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bermicourt, this is currently a portal directed at readers.  As the nomination shows, it has failed in that task.  However, your comment above describes it effectively as  a tool for editors.  If you believe that it would be of use to editors, then I would happily support its move to project space. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:54, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * , I just mentioned some concerns about this at the discussion for Portal:Berlin. This was already done to that portal, but now it has incoming links from article space and can easily be moved back down the line. I think Bermicourt instead should copy the information that is thought to be useful to editors, paste it in a new WikiProject page, and let the portal be deleted. -Crossroads- (talk) 21:52, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * if the discussion is closed as "delete" or "move", then any move back can be WP:G4 speedied. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:05, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I see, thanks. That still leaves the issue of the incoming links, but it looks like you or XfDCloser can remove those. -Crossroads- (talk) 22:32, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I have removed or replaced about 150,00 such links in the last two months, so a few more is no bother. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:53, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree with BrownHairedGirl that this style of portal is better than others. However, the cost of its maintenance is clearly still higher than its perceived benefits, otherwise there wouldn't be a section on "new categories" with the last dates being in 2017. The portal could be viable if it's reduced to static content which only needs to be updated once every 10 or 20 years (like the "born over 200 years ago" list) and which cannot fit any article. Nemo 09:54, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Per WP:COMMONSENSE Second level country divisions not are a broad subject area. The ideal would be to work on these topics in the country portal.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:03, 1 October 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.