Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Rugby union

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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) 01:56, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Rugby union

 * – (View MfD)

Another neglected portal on another sport that is called football. Portal:Rugby union has | 11 daily average pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to | 1976 for the head article. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Rugby union shows 8 biographies and 13 monthly articles, 9 pictures, and 50 quotes. The biographies were forked between 2007 and 2014, and some were updated as recently as 2014. The articles, of which there are two for May, were forked in 2006 through 2008, but only the article for the current month can be viewed by a reader. Some of the bios and articles have been updated by bots. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:04, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Rugby Union

 * Delete as nominator due to low readership, too few articles and too little maintenance of articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:04, 26 October 2019 (UTC) Robert McClenon (talk) 20:04, 26 October 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:Sports), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:55, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep clearly a large enough topic for a portal. SportingFlyer  T · C  09:46, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Its complete abandonment is another case study of why WP Portals are technologically redundant to other superior WP options/tools.
 * a. For content, the Rugby Union Main Article gives a far better, larger/comprehensive (Main Article is GA rated and extensive), structured read (with mouseovers), that is actively monitored and edited.
 * b. For navigation, the Rugby Union Navboxes are far better, and by being transcluded to many articles, are also kept more up to date.
 * c. Finally, for a full directory of all Rugby Union topic FA/GA articles, the WikiProject Rugby union has a full non-POV’ed directory.
 * This portal is therefore “rationally abandoned” by editors, WProject editors, and readers (and even vandals, unlike the main article), in favour of superior WP alternatives. Because of this, the Rugby Union portal is unlikely to recover from that situation, and “band-aid” solutions based on nostalgia for what this redundant technology was once meant to be, will be wasted effort as this Portals will need to be deleted one way or another to avoid obvious longer-term content forking issues. Britishfinance (talk) 13:16, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The lack of attention to the portal by the minions of Genseric can be explained for several reasons. First, portals contain no gold or silver.  Second, the images are partially clothed, neither properly nude nor fully dressed, and clothed statues cannot be disfigured in the usual manners (for male and female statues).  Third, the images are two-dimensional, and his minions are not iconoclasts.  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:21, 27 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator and per @Britishfinance.
 * The nominator has documented how the portal has been long-neglected and has very low readership. The lack pageviews isn't due to a lack of links: there are backlinks from 806 articles and 715 categories.
 * There is also no recent interest from the WP:WikiProject Rugby union, and positive evidence of the process of rational abandonment described by @Britishfinance. I searched the project's talk page+archives for "Portal:Rugby union", and found 7 mentions in the talk page archives.  I examined the 4 most recent:
 * January 2010: a note that the portal has not been updated. No replies.
 * February 2010: note of some outdated pages, which appear to have been updated as a result of the discussion.
 * September 2013: some detailed discussion about possible improvements. It is unclear how much of the list was done.
 * April 2018: a post by User:Aircorn mentioning the WP:ENDPORTALS RFC, and noting the portals' neglect. Aircorn writesWhatever the result of the deletion discussion we may want to think about how useful this particular portal is. There was no reply.
 * That pattern of lack of interest is also evident at Portal talk:Rugby union. A steady trickle of discussion in the early years, but the last non-broadcast human post was by an IP in July 2015, and the last actual discussion (where one human replied to another human) was in 2011: Portal talk:Rugby union.
 * So yet again we have unmaintained portal, unwanted by readers and without any recent WikiProject interest. And yet again we have  portal enthusiast making a one-line !vote to keep it, despite the rational abandonment. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:57, 27 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete this wortless portal forever.Catfurball (talk) 18:47, 28 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Agree. You can't have rugby without beer. AIRcorn (talk) 08:46, 2 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator, per the delete votes above, and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the poor condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Portals are not content, like an article is, since they are for navigation instead. It is therefore improper to use rationales meant for keeping articles to argue that this failed navigation device should be kept. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised or done at the last minute just to stave off deletion. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. The community's consensus not to delete all portals is not a consensus to keep all portals; instead they are to be evaluated individually, as is being done here. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve old and inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:02, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom, Britishfinance, and @ Brown HairedGirl . This portal is long abandoned and rationally unwanted by readers and maintainers because it has no useful purpose. It's an old relic from a time when portals were being created with reckless abandon and a belief that "if we build it, others will maintain it" or "it will get better someday, somehow", which are beliefs 15 years of hard evidence show to be delusions divorced from reality. Newshunter12 (talk) 08:31, 1 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Pinged here. Don't really have much to add beyond my quoted text above. It is obviously a big enough area to deserve a portal, but if no one is really interested in its upkeep then it doesn't really serve its intended purpose. AIRcorn (talk) 08:51, 2 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment The World Cup just happened, so editing might pick up/someone might jump to wanting to maintain it soon. Kingsif (talk) 11:23, 2 November 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.