Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Sudan (2nd nomination)

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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 | spill the beans _ 17:51, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Sudan


Stillborn portal. This portal was previously deleted in 2009 for not being written in English. The seven bios and two selected articles have gone without updates since 2010. The entry for South Sudan calls it Southern Sudan. Article has been at South Sudan since 2011. Omar al-Bashir bio is out of date too since he was ousted in April. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 03:19, 26 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment – No prejudice against re-creation of a curated, completed, up-to-date portal. North America1000 05:10, 26 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 9 years since its creation in March 2010‎, this portal has attracted no maintainers and almost no readers.
 * 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 find the relics listed at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Sudan:
 * 7 "selected article", all of which are content forks unchanged since creation in 2010.
 * Portal:Sudan/In the news, which displays nothing
 * Portal:Sudan/Did you know/1 to Portal:Sudan/Did you know/10, all still displaying the same items as in 2100. Per WP:DYK, "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 9-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * The C-class head article 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) 17:17, 26 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete this portal is terrible one selected article and one selected biography, what a shame.Catfurball (talk) 20:15, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete – As noted by nominator, no maintenance since created in 2010. One of the DYKs is about West Africa, and Sudan is not in West Africa.  The DYKs are not an important aspect of any portal, but stupid errors indicate a lack of attention.  It refers to Southern Sudan because South Sudan wasn't a country in 2010, which just shows that this is a stillborn portal.  (It is a twice-stillborn portal, since a previous version had to be deleted as not being in English.)  I agree that the portal is terrible, but I disagree as to only one article; I count seven articles and two biographies, including some that contain obsolete information.  The portal has 13 daily pageviews, as contrasted with 5684 pageviews for Sudan.  This portal does not appear to have been assessed since portal assessment was introduced a year ago, which does not give much reason to expect that portal advocates will be able to design a properly built portal; but if another editor wants to develop a portal that does not rely on subpages, which are a failure, they know where Deletion Review is.    Robert McClenon (talk) 21:23, 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 23:11, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No moratorium. These 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) 23:37, 28 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. As a portal about an entire nation it obviously meets the portal guideline demand for a broad subject area. It has the potential to attract a large number of readers and maintainers according to the guideline. If it does not, then it must be because it requires improvement. And the correct line of correction for content that requires improvement is not deletion. There is no deadline. --Hecato (talk) 08:44, 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) 15:37, 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 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.
 * It is also notable that Knowledgekid87 has posted a near-identical boilerplate response to at least half-a-dozen MFD nominations, each of which has had detailed evidence posted well before Knowledgekid87's arrival. Knowledgekid87 doesn't simply ignore the evidence, but goes the next step and dishonestly dismisses it as IDONTLIKEIT.  This sort of spammed dishonesty is disruptive conduct.  --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:08, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Can we please keep this discussion centralized? I do not like how you are painting me as being disruptive here or your lack of good faith. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:11, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * As soon as you stop being disruptive and dishonest, I will stop commenting on those issues. Your call. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:15, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Look...from what I can see you already are getting under the skin of editors. In my case... calling someone else "dishonest" because you don't like their argument isn't helpful, it's on you to be civil, assume good faith, and respond to their claim. You are going at my throat because I posted an essay as my rationale, accusing me of not reading guidelines and ignoring things, and accusing me of being disruptive. Yes I did a same argument rationale on a number of AfDs, other editors do the same when the argument they feel is in the same area. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:22, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Knowledgekid87, I am calling you dishonest because you are being dishonest. Your misrepresentation of others is deeply uncivil, so don't feign surprise that it provokes a sharp reply. It is up to you to choose whether to change your conduct.
 * I note your comment that I did a same argument rationale on a number of AfDs. So you acknowledge that you are spamming these discussions rather than responding to the actual evidence ... and crucially, you refer to them as AFDs.   This is not AFD, it is MFD.  Unlike AFD, MFD does not discuss enyclopedic content.  Before you start spatting boilerplate smear text around the place, could you not at least manage the courtesy of figuring out which discussion venue you are in? --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:32, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, that was a slipup on my part as I meant MfD. I responded to the actual evidence of WP:POG not applying as countries are broad topic areas. Citing WP:IDONTLIKEIT isn't a "misrepresentation of others" as it applies to the encyclopedia and not the person. We wouldn't have the argument if it was meant as some sort of personal attack. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:39, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * You continue to misrepresent policy by selectively quoting. You write WP:POG not applying as countries are broad topic areas, but omit the rest of sentence "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". That omission is the mechanism by which you simply ignore the evidence that for a decade this topic has not been broad enough to "attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".  Omitting it once might be excused an oversight; but repeatedly omitting it even when corrected is wilful dishonesty.
 * Your claim that IDONTLIKEIT applies to the encyclopedia and not the person is simply untrue. It is a dismissal of the argument made by another  editor, so it very clearly applies to the person who made it.
 * Please clean up your act, and try being honest for a change. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:43, 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) 00:24, 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.
 * Delete per nominator. Nobody is maintaining this. Many if not most people in Sudan do not speak English or have internet access, so they are not likely to start caring about this. -Crossroads- (talk) 17:07, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. I don't agree with the comment above that "As a portal about an entire nation it obviously meets the portal guideline demand for a broad subject area.". DexDor(talk) 17:26, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom and BrownHairedGirl. This portal clearly fails WP:POG since it doesn't have a broad enough scope to attract readers and maintainers given that it has had no maintainers in over nine years and almost no readers. I also ask what good is a blank news section that even when clicked on tells readers nothing about the fall of long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir and the ongoing upheaval in Sudan? None. Portals stand or fall in the now on their merits, not given moratoriums to keep counter-productive junk forever on the chance someday something might get better when the stars align. Given the near decade of evidence that this is not a suitable topic for a portal, I am strongly against allowing recreation. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:51, 5 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.