Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Regions of Oceania portals

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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: speedy deleted WP:G7 by Db-author request of the creator, User:Buaidh. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:28, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Regions of Oceania portals


A trio of automated-spam format portals on excessively narow topics. These are a subset of the many portals created today. I spotted them by looking at Related changes for Category:All portals. They turn out to have all been created by one editor: User:Buaidh. It is not plausible that one editor can maintain all these new portals, and in the case of these portal there is clear evidence that they fail 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".

We already have a severe shortage of maintainers for nearly all existing geographic portals, most of which also have very low pageviews. There is no reason to believe that creating a pointless new portal will suddenly make a bunch of maintainers and readers magically appear out of nowhere.

Micronesia‎, Melanesia‎ and Polynesia‎ are all sub-regions of Oceania. Each of them covers a large expanse of ocean, with a small population dispersed among multiple islands. Owing to wikipedia's systemic bias issues, Wikipedia coverage of these topics is poor, and there are few editors working on them. The relevant WikiProject are all moribund, if not outright defunct: I checked WT:WikiProject Polynesia, WT:WikiProject Melanesia‎, WT:WikiProject Micronesia ... and none of them has any discussion in 2018 or 2019. Their talkpages are just noticeboards for wider announcements, with no replies.

It is noticeable that these three portals were created without even a prior notification at any of the eponymous portals. There was absolutely no effort to test whether they were likely to meet the requirement foe "large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

These portals have been created using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}. This a template devised by the notorious portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH), who used it to personally spam out thousands of automated pseudo-portals, some of them just for the heck of it.

Those automated portals create a selected article list based on a navbox, of which they therefore become simply pointless duplicates. Most of the navbox-clone portalspam was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two), and the rest in smaller groups. All but one or two of the ~4200 portals created in this way have been deleted, so this type of portal is clearly deprecated.

All 3 portals are currently tagged as under construction, which may possibly indicate an intention to covert them to a different format. However, even if the automated spam format is temporary, the more fundamental problem remains: the scope is too narrow to attract readers and maintainers.

Meanwhile, we have the broader Portal:Oceania, which has been abandoned for over a decade. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Oceania shows that its core display is a set of "Daily articles", one for each day of the months. All are static content forks; most are untouched for between 600 and 700 weeks, i.e. 12–14 years.

If editors want to put any work into geographic portals for this area, it would be vastly more useful to rescue Portal:Oceania than to create new spam portals on sub-topics whose WikiProjects resemble a different classic Python skit. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:55, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete all Seven portals in seven minutes, using the dreaded Basic Portal Startpage portalspam template, means these run directly counter to the community-wide consensus established at Village pump (proposals)/Archive 157. I informed User:Buaidh of same on his talkpage, hoping for subsequent G7s that would save us from this, but no luck. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:22, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please keep: I would prefer to rebuild these three portals and delete Portal:Oceania.


 * The following four deleted portals redirect to Portal:Melanesia:
 * Portal:Fiji
 * Portal:New Caledonia
 * Portal:Solomon Islands
 * Portal:Vanuatu


 * The following six deleted portals redirect to Portal:Micronesia:
 * Portal:Federated States of Micronesia
 * Portal:Kiribati
 * Portal:Marshall Islands
 * Portal:Nauru
 * Portal:Palau
 * Portal:Tokelau


 * The following seven deleted portals redirect to Portal:Micronesia:
 * Portal:Cook Islands
 * Portal:French Polynesia
 * Portal:Niue
 * Portal:Pitcairn Islands
 * Portal:Samoa
 * Portal:Tonga
 * Portal:Wallis and Futuna


 * No portals redirect to Portal:Oceania
 * Yours aye, Buaidh  talk contribs 03:25, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Reply of all the pointless reasons I have heard to keep a set of spam portals, the most pointless is that they are the targets of un-needed redirects  created by the maker of the spam portals.  That's entirely circular logic, amounting to "keep the pages i create 'cos they point to each other".
 * Almost all links to portals are created by templates which generate a link only when the target actually exists, so the creation of these redirects removes no redlinks. What it does do is to create a forest of misleading bluelinks, which tell the reader that there is for example a Portal:Nauru, when the link leads to a much broader portal.  That's simply a waste of the time of readers.
 * Note that Buaidh's personal fixation with turning every possible title of geographical portal into a bluelink extended even to re-creating the redirects deleted at WP:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 June 27 per the nomination of User:Tavix.
 * Between creating automated spam portals contrary to an RFC, and re-creating redirects contrary to RFD, Buaidh is showing little respect for WP:Consensus.
 * I urge Buaidh to reconsider UnitedStatesian's suggestion of a G7 speedy deletion. It would be a good way to reverse the impression that Buiadh disdains consensus. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:09, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * PS the suggestion of deleting Portal:Oceania because no portals redirect to it is utterly absurd. Over 22,000 pages link to Portal:Oceania, and the suggestion of deleting it in favour of automated spam suggests WP:CIR issues: it would break 22,000 links.  It's also staggeringly dishonest, because e.g.  did redirect to Portal:Oceania  until Buaidh retargetted it only 13 hours before his post above. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:20, 29 July 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.