Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Royal Navy

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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) 23:41, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Royal Navy


Neglected portal.

Eleven selected bios. One was created in April 2007, two from July 2007, three from September 2007, two from November 2008, one from January 2008 and one from March 2008. All never updated.

Nine selected battles from April 2007 that were never updated, with the exception of minor tweaks in January 2013 to Portal:Royal Navy/Selected battle/3 and Portal:Royal Navy/Selected battle/9.

Nine never-updated selected ships from April 2007, one from September 2007 and one from March 2008.


 * Errors
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/1 HMS Victory has been flagship of the First Sea Lord since October 2012
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/2 HMS Ocean decommissioned in March 2018, sold to Brazil
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/4 RMAS Colonel Templer Stub-class article. Sold to Swedish firm in 2011
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/6 HMS Albion Start or C-class article. Went offline for six years for refits, recommissioned 2017
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/7 HMS Cardiff scrapped c. 2009
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/8 HMS Endurance Start or C-class article. Had a catastrophic accident and was decommissioned in 2008. Sold to Turkey in 2016 for scrap
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/8 RFA Oakleaf C-class article. Links to Disambiguation page. Decommissioned and sold to Turkey for scrap in 2009
 * Portal:Royal Navy/Selected ship/11 HMS Daring B- or C-class article. Commissioned in 2009. Has a red-linked image.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 22:31, 26 August 2019 (UTC) Portal:Royal Navy has |13 daily pageviews in Jan-Jun 2019, as opposed to 2601 for the article. Its originator edits sporadically. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Royal Navy shows 11 ships, 11 biographies, and 10 battles, mostly edited in 2011. As noted above, the ship information is not current. This is not the Ship of Theseus paradox. The use of forked subpages makes portals prone to errors. The battles don't need to be updated, but maintenance is expected for portals. There is no short-term reason to expect that a re-creation of this portal will address the problems. Any proposed re-creation of this portal using a more modern design, and taking into account the failures of many portals, can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:51, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete -
 * Delete per the nom and Robert McClenon. This portal has been abandoned for over a decade, save for a few one-off updates by passing editors, and is packed with wildly inaccurate information. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This decrepit portal has had over a decade of no steady maintainers and it had a very low 13 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article Royal Navy had 2,601 views per day in the same period.
 * WP:DYK states: "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 decade-old set has nothing to do with new or expanded articles, so its only effect is as a WP:TRIVIA section. 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 over a decade of hard evidence shows the Royal Navy is not a broad enough topic to attract readers and maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:21, 27 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment – A few comments on Do You Knows in portals are in order. As BrownHairedGirl and User:Newshunter12 point out, the Do You Know section of the Main Page has quality criteria, so that the hooked articles are recently improved articles, and the DYK section of the Main Page is not a general trivia section.  The Do You Knows in portals are almost always a general trivia section.  However, there is neither a guideline requiring Do You Knows in portals, nor a guideline specifying that, if there are Do You Knows, they have passed any test.  They are therefore almost always a general trivia section.  General trivia are not permitted in article space.  My own thinking is that portals almost always have Do You Knows precisely because providing general trivia on a one-time basis is fun for portal originators, and is a way of sneaking around the rule against general trivia in article space.  The Do You Knows of portals are useless, and are not a reason to keep a portal.  Robert McClenon (talk) 12:25, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator. We could have an an interesting theoretical debate on whether one country's navy (albeit formerly the world's dominant navy for 2 centuries) is a "broad topic", but in practice the question is moot. Regardless of whether the topic is seen as broad enough, the problem remains that per WP:POG,  portals also need large number of readers and maintainers  ... and for over a decade, this portal has not been maintained. Unless there is a team of maintainers committed to keeping this portal in good shape for the long-term, it will simply rot again, and continue to lure a few readers away from a good B-class head article to a rotted portal.
 * WP:POG 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". In this case, the three WikiProjects with interest in this topic are WP:UK, WP:SHIPS and WP:MILHIST. All have a much broader focus, and none has shown any interest in the portal.
 * So this portal fails three of the key requirements of POG: it lacks readers, has no maintainers, and lacks a WikiProject. After 12 years, it has clearly failed. Time to just delete it. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:31, 28 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks?  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:United Kingdom, Portal:Nautical and Portal:War), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:18, 31 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.