Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of the United Arab Emirates

 __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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 18:24, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of the United Arab Emirates

 * – (View MfD) &#8203;

It looks like this WIkiProject never got off the ground, it only contains a Version 1.0 bot report. Liz Read! Talk! 05:07, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete as in no reason to keep and little reason to delete. Too narrow a topic for a WikiProject; right for an article.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:00, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete as a never-active WikiProject with too narrow a scope. If for some reason the creator wants to try and get it going, then it can be kept. —  csc -1 03:30, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to WikiProject Geography. Very few WikiProjects need deletion. Inactive WikiProjects can and should be merged and redirected to their parent.  See WP:ATD. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:01, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, I nominated another WikiProject today before I saw your comment, SmokeyJoe. I'm reluctant to turn a WikiProject page into just a redirect but I guess, given the lack of activity, if any editor objects, they can revert the edit. Liz Read! Talk! 04:49, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi Liz. This is the sort of comment I have been making for a few years, about inactive WikiProjects and Taskforces and Portals, and I don't recall ever getting a response, so I am glad to get yours today.
 * If the WikiProject is inactive, then no one interested in the WikiProject is going to engage in an MfD. If a couple of MfD regulars rubber stamp support your nomination, it then locks in you decision pretty hard, and hides the edit history of at least one person who once had an idea.
 * If you are wrong about the WikiProject being inactive, and an interested editor turns up next month, there is a huge barrier to them doing something about it.
 * If you were to boldly redirect, you can give your entire rationale above in the edit summary, and the problem is fixed. There is no administrative overhead except for your own effort.  The author and any other interested editor can check the history for what was there.
 * If someone wants to disagree about the WikiProject being inactive, they can easily revert the redirect. Presumably, if they do this responsibly, they will also attempt something to make it better than it was before.
 * My approach to these WikiProject and Taskforce nominations is to go to the main article, sometimes called the parent article, then go it its talk page, and look for the most active and relevant Wikiproject, and suggest redirection to that WikiProject. The benefit of redirection, beyond keeping edit histories available for their authors, is that anyone jumping straight to the page, whether from an incoming link, an offline bookmark, or from memory, they will be sent to the WikiProject that is more suitable for them to work within.
 * For Portals, if the portal is out of date, and moribund, readers will be better off at the parent article. If the Portal has structure and resources, these are for editors, and it fits in the WikiProject.  Therefore for defunct Portals, I think the default action should be to move it under the connected WikiProject, and redirect the Portal title to the mainspace parent article.  This achieves a function situation moving forward, preserves history, has low administrative overhead, can be readily reverted on a late disagreement, avoids the regular principled XfD "Keep" vs "Delete" fights, and aligns with deletion policy, WP:ATD.
 * I think it is a curious thing that editors find it more comfortable to nominate at MfD than to fix it there and then with a redirect. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:16, 3 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete As one who is very active in the WikiProject space, I assure you there is significant editor overhead in making never-started projects into redirects (for starters, Special:AllPages has no way to filter redirects out). There is nothing useful in the history of these projects that would help the hypothetical future restarting editor: much better to start from the beginning, via WikiProject Council/Proposals, should that day come. WP:TNT exists for a reason. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:27, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi User:UnitedStatesian. Thanks for coming here.  I am interested in resolving the question of whether inactive wikiproject should be archived by redirection to something useful, such as another WikiProject but of more breadth.
 * "there is significant editor overhead in making never-started projects into redirects"
 * Really? In this case, there is but one page, plus its talk page.  This will be a single redirect action.  Why is this an overhead that exceed the creation, running, and closing of an MfD dicussion?
 * RE: "never-started" and There is nothing useful in the history.
 * That is a different point. I agree that archiving zero-information content is a net negative.  An archive should be assumed to contain history.  This WikiProject was made with a contribution of one sentence, 11 years ago.  Since then, there have only been gnome or bot edits to it and its talk page.  Does this meeting WP:G2?  I think at a stretch it does.
 * The author, User:Mar4d, is editing today. It would be nice if he would comment. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:49, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Liz, do you think that you could have deleted this page per WP:G2? SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:50, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
 * User:UnitedStatesian, a separate question, as you have raised WikiProject Council/Proposals. In the past, I have discussed this with User:TenPoundHammer, as to how WikiProject Council/Proposals is not "mandatory", and about how maybe it should be mandatory.  Is the following line: WikiProject, which is thin, stillborn, and was not approved at WikiProject Council/Proposals is a sufficient reason to delete it at MfD.
 * Personally, I still think that "WikiProject, which is thin, stillborn, and was not approved at WikiProject Council/Proposals" is a reason to speedily and immediately, unilaterally as a single ordinary edit, redirect to an obvious parent WikiProject. WikiProject Geography is an obvious parent WikiProject for articles related to the geography of the United Arab Emirates. SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:00, 11 August 2021 (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.