Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:South Sudan

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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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 03:01, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:South Sudan


The youngest country is out of date. Of the four selected articles and three selected biographies, only one has been updated since the portal was created in 2012. That means over 80 percent of this country's history has occurred since this page was last maintained. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 01:13, 24 July 2019 (UTC) Robert McClenon (talk) 15:29, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Creating a portal is fun.  Maintaining a portal is work.  There is no obligation to edit regularly or to maintain a portal, but there is no obligation for the Wikipedia community to maintain unused portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:56, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete – I concur with the analysis by User:Mark Schierbecker:
 * This portal has 13 daily pageviews, compared to 3098 daily pageviews for the country head article.
 * Neither the originator nor anyone else has been updating this portal. It has seven articles, which is less than the minimum of 20 specified in what may or may not be a guideline, but if it isn't a guideline, we can Use Common Sense.
 * The portal design relying on partial copies of pages is a failed experiment.
 * This portal should be deleted, without prejudice to re-creation using a design that does not rely on partial copies of pages.


 * Comment – No prejudice against re-creation of a curated, complete, up-to-date portal. North America1000 05:11, 26 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete this portal is terrible, four selected articles and three selected biographies, what a shame.Catfurball (talk) 20:20, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please keep: Could we please have a moratorium on deletions of national portals?  These national portals can be rebuilt and updated.  This is just creating chaos with no benefit to Wikipedia.  Please see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals for the current impact.  Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 23:12, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No moratorium. Thee abandoned portals have been wasting the the time and energy of readers and editors for years. They don't just fail to add value; they actively mislead, by providing outdated or incomplete information.
 * The only chaos here is in Buaidh's imagination and in the list of redlinks which he has created. Wikipedia is significantly improved by the removal of unused, misleading, badly-designed portals which readers avoid.
 * It is very easy to to make glib statements that portals can be rebuilt and updated. The reality is that maintaining them requires a lot of ongoing work by a lot of editors, and in face of the evidence of long-term neglect it is utterly implausible to simply state that this can end.  There might be some credibility to such a statement if there was evidence of a team of active maintainers had formed, but there is no such evidence. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:00, 29 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete, with prejudice against re-creation.
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In this case, we don't need to make estimates of likelihood, because we have clear evidence that in the 7 years since 20102, this portal has attracted no maintainers. We can also see the evidence of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Sudan: the project is moribund.  (The last post which wasn't a notification was in April 2018, asking if there was anyone around.  No reply.
 * An abandoned portal such as this is significantly worse than no portal, because it misleads readers and wastes their time. The existence of a portal promises a gateway to more topics, but instead the poor reader lured to this abandoned junk will have been tricked by a false promise.
 * The C-class head article South Sudan is a vastly better navigational hub than this abandoned portal. Also,  the head article is written in summary style, so it is also a vastly better showcase. As with most portals, this one is a failed solution in search of a problem.  So just delete it and don't re-create it. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:07, 29 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep - per WP:NEGLECT, I am also voting keep as I see no value in WP:IDONTLIKEIT comments. In this case we are talking about an entire country, it does not fall under too narrow of a scope. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:40, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Reply. WP:NEGLECT is irrelevant. It is an essay, rather than policy or guideline, and as such it has zero status.  In any case, it is all about articles, and portals are not articles.
 * The reasons given for deletion are reasoned and policy-based and accompanied by detailed evidence. Knowledgekid87's dismissal of them as IDONTLIKEIT is a lazy and dishonest misrepresentation of the contributions of other editors.
 * It's also clear that Knowledgekid87 has not read WP:POG, which defines scope in terms of ability to sustain a viable portal. It requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but Knowledgekid87 chooses to ignore everything after the comma.
 * So the closing admin will be obliged to attach to no weight to Knowledgekid87's !vote, since it is not based on policy or guidelines. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:56, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

The statement that these portals should be kept so that they can be updated and rebuilt is silly. Most of them use thditor e failed paradigm of partial copies of pages, and if they are rebuilt, should be rebuilt from scratch with dynamite. Besides, if no one is maintaining them, why does it make sense to expect that Godot will upgrade them? As to whether they do any harm, the answer is that many of them present no-longer-correct information, such as about heads of state who have been replaced either democratically or undemocratically. Obsolete information in portals is worse than in articles, because most editors do not know how to update portal subpages. They are not harmless, and no one is about to fix them. Any editor who wants to propose that regional portals should have a special status may do so at WP:POG2019RFC. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:31, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment in response to the call by User:Buaidh and others for a moratorium on the deletion of regional portals: Please discuss this at Village Pump where I have tried to mention the issue of regional portals.  I will personally respect any request for a moratorium to allow discussion of the status of regional portals if it is made there via an RFC.  (I cannot speak for any other editor.)  I will ignore any moratorium request that is not made there.  There have been many comments that nations, states of the United States, and other regions should have portals, but, until now, no serious discussion of the guidelines for such portals.
 * 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.