Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:South Dakota

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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. ST47 (talk) 19:00, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:South Dakota


This is an unmaintained and little-viewed portal on a state of the United States. The following is a listing of the least-viewed state portals:

A complete listing of state portals with metrics can be seen at WP:US State Portal Metrics. Portals that are not maintained are useless, and, if the information that is facing the reader becomes out-of-date, they are worse than useless, because anyone can edit an article, but heritage portals with subpages contain old copies of articles that require special knowledge to edit.

A state of the United States may be considered a priori to be a broad subject area, but this portal has been shown a posteriori not to be attracting readers or a portal maintainer. A portal is a miniature Main Page and requires a substantial investment in volunteer time.

This portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer who is willing to invest the time to support a miniature Main Page under the portal guidelines that are in effect at the time. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:38, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Not sure how pages views qualifies anything for deletion but great chart...lots of work....now only if we could get that done to portal updates.-- Moxy 🍁 22:03, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Moxy - As to how pageviews are relevant to deletion: "Portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date."  This portal has not attracted a large number of interested readers or a portal maintainer, and has been nominated for deletion.  Robert McClenon (talk) 00:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Do you have a suggestion about portal updates? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how much more broad you can get then literally thousands of related sub-articles. Needless to say pageviews isn't a very good way of trying to promote your case.... it's a fundamentally backwards principle how things work here. It's really too bad that this group of editors has decided to focus on deletion of all the portals with zero effort to improve them. Simply disappointing to see a few  editors going against Community consensus Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/RfC: Ending the system of portals "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time.".....zero mention of deleting portals because of view. Sure you guys are doing right by the community over what you think is best ?-- Moxy 🍁 02:49, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Here's the catch. Portal links are allowed in the See also section of relevant articles.  A novice user can go to the portal page to see how to explore and participate in the topic.  If we delete many or all of the portals, then we should allow links to the relevant WikiProjects in the See also section.  If we delete portals, then we should also jam all of the portal contents into the relevant articles, making them all the more bloated and difficult to read.  Your aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 23:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Buaidh - Portals do not have unique content that is not already in articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Most of mine do. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 18:16, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Buaidh - Are you saying that the portals that you maintain have content in the portal that is not copied from any of the articles? If that is not what you are saying, please explain, because I have misunderstood.  If that is what you are saying, I will have to review the portal guidelines again to see whether portals should have unique article content.  Robert McClenon (talk) 16:01, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:PORTAL indicates that a typical portal feature is "Get involved", which links to relevant Wikiprojects. I believe that this is the sort of content User:Buaidh is referring to. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:13, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Portals should contain information about relevant WikiProjects, encouragement to participate, and local Wikimedia activities and events. Mine also contain compilated information from multiple Wikipedia articles presented in a straight-forward format for students and novice users.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 19:31, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Buaidh, can you clarify (e.g. by referring to an example portal) your last sentence? Do you mean portals that automatically copy the lead of articles or portals that have a (static) copy of article text? Note: there's Simple English Wikipedia. DexDor(talk) 16:50, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your condescension, but no, I mean information from several articles presented so a user needn't search around for them.  Buaidh  talk contribs 16:56, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I guess you're referring to the State Facts and State Symbols sections on, for example Portal:South Dakota. That info is shown in infoboxes on the SD article in pretty much the same format as (their forks) on the portal page. DexDor(talk) 20:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Reply to User:Moxy
First, you write: "I'm not sure how much more broad you can get then literally thousands of related sub-articles." You make that point specifically in discussing Portal:South Dakota. It does not have sub-articles at all. I have not seen a portal with thousands of sub-articles. I have seen a few portals with more than a hundred sub-articles, and so I agree that there are thousands of sub-articles, but the issue at MFD is always a particular portal that may have sub-articles, and Portal:South Dakota does not (and thus is a particularly bad case).

Second, sub-articles, when traditionally implemented, are not even up-to-date information, but snapshots of articles at a time in the past. As pointed out below with regard to Portal:Zimbabwe, they may be seriously incorrect. The idea that tens or hundreds of sub-articles provide breadth is bizarre.

Third, I will respond to: "It's really too bad that this group of editors has decided to focus on deletion of all the portals with zero effort to improve them." Neither I nor any other editor that I know of is trying to delete all the portals. But what would be the purpose of trying to improve portals that are not being viewed? I have provided metrics as to heavily viewed portals that can serve as a guide to which portals should be improved.

Fourth, one way to improve the average quality of portals is to delete portals that are of low quality and that are not likely to benefit from improvement.

Fifth, does any editor who complains about the deletion of portals want to volunteer to maintain some of the abandoned ones?

Robert McClenon (talk) 18:34, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
 * OK first There's thousand of bios connected to the state... let alone parks.. highways, political topics... excetera excetera excetera I have to stay over thousands of articles.....Second. ... show me a policy that says something has to be up to date? We all know the norm is to tag it invitng the community to help. Third...Thus far 4,000 portals have been deleted despite the community objection. Fourth.. Deletion has never work for inproving anything..... to improve something you need something to begin with. 5th there's a small group of us that have tried but to our dismay we get reverted and cannot deal with the overwhelming amount of things to do. ...... so again no policy base for deletion you just simply don't like it.... just wish you guys had the Gusto to actually go and get the portal space eliminated over using this back door to get rid of them. Portals being deleted with two votes  despite the community RFC is deplorable and shows us how isolated this notice board is from the community.-- Moxy 🍁 23:13, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Re "Deletion has never work[ed] for inproving anything."  Deleting a page can improve the encyclopedia both in the short term (e.g. by removing incorrect or out of date information especially where other wp pages have better information) and in the longer term (by reducing the number of pages that may require maintenance and thus allowing editor resources to be used more productively). DexDor(talk) 16:31, 20 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator. Too small to add value for the reader, and abandoned since 2010. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:18, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Totally devoid of content. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:49, 24 June 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.