Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:South Carolina

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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 | [chatter] || 18:15, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:South Carolina

 * – (View MfD)

Stillborn portal. Two selected articles created in December 2007 with zero helpful substantial updates. One is a start-class article. Two never-updated C-class selected bios also from December 2007. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 06:56, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Portal:United States. We need to rethink our approach here. Rather than deleting content outright, we should generally be merging unsustainable portals up to sustainable ones. bd2412  T 13:18, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I strongly oppose both merger and redirection:
 * Merger just means preserving a set outdated of content forks, which is a very bad idea.
 * Redirection means that portals links will display a link to a portal which doesn't exist, and then surprise the reader by opening up a portal on a broader topic. Nearly all such redirects have been deleted at RFD for just that reason. It's much better to simply replace the links, as I proposed above. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:57, 1 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:United States), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:57, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. Perfectly good portal. The fact that selected articles need work should be taken up on their respective talk pages, not used as an argument to delete a portal. Bermicourt (talk) 16:27, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Two articles and two biogs is Perfectly good portal?????? Really???  Am I missing some sort of sarcasm or comedy here?  Even POG set a minimum of twenty articles, which itself was risibly low.
 * The fact that a noted enthusiast for portals is prepared to described this still-born-then-abandoned junk as a perfectly good portal speaks tragic volumes about why WikiProject Portals has allowed portalspace to rot for a decade without even systematic quality assessment.
 * After all these months of scrutinising portals at MFD, it is utterly ridiculous that any editor would come to MFD to claim that list of articles whose titles would all fit on one line is a perfectly good portal. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:58, 1 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this state. Low page views (13/day, compared to 2,384/day for South Carolina) and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, so any comparison to how broken articles are handled would be improper. The downgrading of POG cuts both ways - there is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. 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. Content forks are worthless and should not be saved via merger. A redirect would confuse readers; it is better to replace with a link to the next most specific portal. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and maintenance will ever materialize, and the assertion the portal is "perfectly good" is a sign of very low standards for portals. -Crossroads- (talk) 01:11, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Tagged US Portals

 * Comment - A complete list of metrics for US state portals, including deleted portals, is available at US State Portal Metrics. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:00, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

South Carolina

 * Delete - Far too few articles, low viewing, not maintained.
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense.  It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers.  This imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense:  (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained.  Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
 * I respectfully disagree with User:BD2412 about changing our deletions of portals to upmerges. They caution against deleting content outright, but portals should not provide unique content.  Portals provide arbitrarily selected content that often becomes outdated.  There is no need to preserve and build up portals that have what BHG properly calls a Rube Goldberg machine structure.  Adding more arbitrarily selected portions of articles to an existing arbitrary selection of portions of articles just increases the Rube Goldberg factor.  It will not make the higher-level portals sustainable.  The proposed upmerging of portals should not be confused with the upward redirection of backlinks by BHG.
 * It isn't clear how a portal is "perfectly good" when it has only 4 articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:00, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * As you have noted, there are only four articles - two biographies, one of a Continental Army soldier, the other of a noted songwriter, and two "featured articles", one on a well-known island, the other on a sports stadium. Other than the stadium, which may be a bit too localized in its community of interest, I see nothing here that would not fit just as well into Portal:United States. Virtually every biographical, geographical, or historical topic in the United States arises from some particular state. bd2412  T 04:06, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete states don't need portals period.Catfurball (talk) 19:16, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator. This portal was never actually built.  It's just a placeholder, and in 12 years nobody has bothered to develop it or even to maintain the little that is there.  The result is a waste of the time of any readers lured there.  Luckily, not many readers visit this relic, but it's still not right to trick readers in this way.
 * The last 6 months of MFDs have shown that very few sub-national regions attract enough readers or maintainers to make a viable portal. Over a dozen US states are on that list of failed and deleted portals, and the evidence is very clear that this one belongs on that list.  Note that the portal has been listed at WikiProject South Carolina/Article alerts since 1 October, but nobody from the project has come to MFD to express any interest, let alone to offer to maintain it. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:38, 8 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.