Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Washington (state)

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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) 02:31, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Washington (state)

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected portal. Six selected articles. Five never-updated entries were created in July 2008 (except one was created in November 2008). One never-updated entry created in September 2012. Five selected bios created in July 2008. One update was made to an entry in January 2013.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:36, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Errors
 * Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft Chairman in 2014
 * Paul Allen died in October 2018. He stepped down as Charter Communications Chairman in 2011.
 * Ichiro Suzuki retired this year. He hasn't played for the New York Yankees since 2014.


 * Comment - Note former title Portal:Washington when checking backlinks. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:50, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Mark Schierbecker, I spent a lot of time last month disambiguating portal links. As a result, there are now no links from articles or categories to the dab page Portal:Washington. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:18, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep the topic is large enough for a portal. Also, in spite of the lack of updates, I still associate Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Ichiro Suzuki with the state of Washington, and the navigation provided by the portal is helpful. SportingFlyer  T · C  09:28, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Bill Gates and company are mentioned in Washington (state), isn't that enough? Nemo 11:25, 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) 17:19, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Washington State

 * Delete as per analysis by User:Mark Schierbecker. Low views, not many articles, no maintenance on articles.
 * 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.
 * Outdated information illustrates the unsoundness of using content-forked subpages. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:19, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete states don't need portals period.Catfurball (talk) 19:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per @Mark Schierbecker and @Robert McClenon.
 * Over a decade after is creation, this portal remains in a terrible state. This is yet another unmaintained portal, complete with the usual characteristics of abandoned portals: a small set of stale content forks, stale news and stale fake DYKs.
 * Articles: A mere 11 selected articles+bogs is a pathetically small set, barely half the risibly low minimum of 20 set by the former guideline WP:POG, and nowhere remotely near big enough to provide a decent sample of the topic. The fact that they are decade-old content forks makes the problem even worse.
 * News: Portal:Washington (state)/Wikinews/News was last updated in 2017, so the portal is displaying 2017 stories as if they were current.
 * Did you know: The most recent DYK addition was Portal:Washington (state)/Did you know/4, added in 2009. None of its three entries have any connection to the scrutinised process behind WP:DYK; they are just unscrutinised random trivia. 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 even if some other pages of this ten-plus year-old set is not actually fake, they has lost the newness, so they are still just trivia.
 * This whole Rube Goldberg machine model of portal with content-forked subpages is a complete failure. Its sheer complexity poses a huge barrier to potential maintainers, and even if it is maintained it's a huge usability failure. It displays no list of topics on the face of the portal, just an excerpt of one article at a time, and it is absurd to confront readers the whole business of having to purge the page (a counter-intuitive step) just to see one other item from an invisible list whose length isn't even disclosed.
 * The head article Washington (state) is a B-class article. It's daft to lure readers away from that fine page to misconceived, abandoned junk like this portal. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:14, 2 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) 21:15, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the already mentioned reasons, and as a washington state article editor who has never seen any use in the portal on articles I have written, the Articles themselves should cover the information that is found in the portal in the first place.-- Kev min  § 02:07, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this condition. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, being for navigation instead, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated and useless portals to articles and say they should just be fixed. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and maintenance will ever materialize anyway. 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. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:06, 3 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.