Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Syria

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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) 04:12, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Syria

 * – (View MfD)

Abandoned portal on a contentious topic. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." This portal has neither large numbers of readers and no maintainers. The portal has essentially been abandoned for about six years, save a few one-off updates by passing editors. Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Anas Salloum, who last updated the portal in July 2007, and retired from Wikipedia in 2014. The page view count is very low. From January 1 - June 30 2019, there was an average of 17 views per day to the main page (while the head article Syria had 5,031 views per day in the same period.) There is a stark long term downward trend in views - the July 1 to Dec. 30 2015 portal rate was 39 views per day.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Syria shows of the 12 articles, all have been untouched since creation in 2012 (aside from a few page disambiguation's). Article 7 is about the city of Homs and states the Syrian Army has been besieging the city since May 2011, but the Siege of Homs ended in May 2014. The one selected city article was last updated in 2008, so it has no mention of the Battle of Aleppo (2012–2016), the mass devastation it brought, or the population collapse. The one biography and one building article were added by a passing editor in May, 2019. This leaves us five articles short of POG's minimum of 20.

The DYK section has over 180 individual entries, which appear to all or overwhelmingly have been created and last touched in about 2012-13, while WP:DYK states: "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 about seven-year-old set has nothing to do with new or expanded articles, so its only effect is as a WP:TRIVIA section. More alarmingly is the outdated nature of some of these DYK's. Portal:Syria/Did you know/L/6, last updated in Sep. 2012, describes the Temple of Bel as the "best preserved" ruin in Palmyra, but it was blown up by ISIS in August 2015. The four-picture gallery received formatting updates in 2018, but otherwise dates to 2012-13. The Things to Do page has been untouched since creation in 2007. The Related portals page still lists Portal:Middle East and Portal:Arab world, both deleted in June (one was re-created as a redirect to Portal:Asia, which is already in this section).

WP:POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal.". However, WikiProject Syria is inactive (the last editor to editor conversation was in Dec. 2015), and it appears to have never had anything meaningful to do with this portal. There has never been any mention of this portal on the talk page.

Furthermore, this abandoned junk portal barely mentions the Syrian Civil War or the dramatic impacts it has had on every aspect of the country and the de-facto political fracturing of the country into multiple statelets. The sparse mentions demonstrate the abject abandonment and decay of this portal into misleading irrelevance. It's time to just Delete it. Newshunter12 (talk) 22:37, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Portal:Syria. The national portal had 17 daily pageviews in the period of Jan1-Jun30 2019, as opposed to 5031 for the article Syria.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Syria shows 12 articles, 1 city, 1 biography, and 1 building, which is 15 articles, less than 20.  It also shows 185 Did You Know items, which I have not reviewed because they are irrelevant to quality of the portal.  Two of the articles were added in May 2019 by User:Northamerica1000.   Most of them have been unchanged since 2012.  There does not appear to be consistent maintenance.  (The one recent editor is multi-tasked among dozens of portals.)  Since the country is, as noted by User:Greyshark09, divided into war zones by the Syrian Civil War, providing a neutral point of view is difficult and unnecessary.  Providing a neutral point of view in articles is required by the second pillar of Wikipedia.   Any editing of the article is likely to be within the scope of discretionary sanctions on the Syrian Civil War.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:42, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * @Robert McClenon DYK's are not irrelevant to the quality of the portal when they clearly provide inaccurate information. I agree that at best they are fluff and are not a reason to keep a portal. Newshunter12 (talk) 22:47, 8 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Neutral - per my remarks on portal:Syrian Civil War.GreyShark (dibra) 11:44, 9 September 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:Asia), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:33, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per User:Newshunter12 and Robert McClenon. Low readership + poor maintenance = clear fail of the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".
 * The fact that this portal is actively serving up inaccurate and outdated information makes things even worse. It's not just a waste of time, it's a positive menace which hurts readers and damages Wikipedia's reputation. And the lack of scrutiny of a portal about such a contested topic. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:52, 11 September 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.