Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ethiopia

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. While the subject of Ethiopia is likely to be broad enough to meet WP:POG, it cannot be ignored that the portal is not meeting the other requirements of WP:POG (that it is actively maintained, and that it attracts significant viewership). ‑Scottywong | express || 02:15, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Ethiopia

Stillborn portal has not been updated at all since 2010. Six selected articles, three bios. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 08:29, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nominator.

This is a long-abandoned mini-portal, with only half the WP:POG-required minimum of 20 articles. It has had no maintenance sine it was created in 2010 by Belovedfreak (talk · contribs), whose last contribution to portalspace was in 2011.[1]

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Ethiopia is large country with an ancient history, although Wikipedia's systemic bias means that it is not covered in anywhere near the detail of the OECD countries. We could have an interesting theoretical debate about whether it qualifies as a "broad topic", but there is no room for debate about the evidence of the last nine years: that far from attracting the required "large numbers" of maintainers, this has attracted none. There doesn't seem to be much any basis for hoping that WP:WikiProject Ethiopia could be a pace to recruit new maintainers. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethiopia shows a low level of posts, and the last discussion (where one editor replied to another) was in January 2015.

The portal functions of showcasing content and aiding navigation are much better served by the B-class head article Ethiopia and its navboxes. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:06, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per the nom and BHG. This portal has been abandoned for over nine years and was never completed to POG content standards. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had over nine years of no maintainers and it had an abysmal 22 views per day in June and July 2019 (despite the head article Ethiopia having 6623 views per day in the same period). Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I am strongly against allowing recreation, as over nine years of hard evidence shows Ethiopia is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:22, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per Mark S, BHG, and NH12. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:24, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Meets the WP:POG guideline's breadth of subject-area requirement, as the third largest country in Africa by population, site of the first anatomically modern humans, many other factors. Over 5,000 pages in scope (including 20 that are FA/GA status); adding 20 of them will take me less than an hour. Main article does not have the following portal features: news section (which updated automatically just days ago), DYK, category tree, links to collaboration tools; main article navboxes are missing links to featured article Ethiopian historiography and to other FAs/GAs. Now that there are far fewer portals, the attraction of readers and maintainers to those that remain is far more likely (which is all the guideline requires) and make historical statistics irrelevant at this time. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:17, 20 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Reply @UnitedStatesian, I think that your logic is faulty.

1. Number of articles in scope is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a portal. I agree that Ethiopia has great historical significance, but the extent of its total coverage is about the same as a average English county. And no matter how broad the topic, there cannot be a viable portal unless there are enough maintainers.

2. Importance of a topic is very poor guide to editorial activity on Wikipedia. Readers edit what interests them, and our well-documented systemic bias means that we have way more editors actively documenting every aspect of e.g. American college football than we have working on the whole of the Horn of Africa. It's sad, but it is as it is.

3. The portals which have been deleted have overwhelmingly been unmaintained. So there isn't any queue of maintainers looking for a new portal to work on.

"Overwhelmingly" doesn't matter: if any portal with a maintainer was deleted, that maintainer is now free to maintain a different portal (and there have been many, many such cases: I would argue close to a majority if you exclude the TTH-related mass deletions). I was a maintainer on Portal:The Beatles, Portal:William Shakespeare, Portal:Charles Dickens, many other deleted ones. (you as an administrator can confirm that because you can view my edits to deleted pages; I'm not and so can't). How many now-deleted portals were you maintaining User:Northamerica1000? How about you, User:Bermicourt? UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:46, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

4. The main article has scope for improvement, but there is far greater chance of it being improved because it gets far more readers.

5. The features you mention as not being on article are no reason to create a portal. DYKs are trivia, and a category tree is available from every head article in one click: just visit the category page, and expand away to your hearts delight.

Au contraire, they are precisely the reason to create a portal that meets the breadth-of-subject-matter requirements of WP:POG, because "Portals serve as enhanced "Main Pages" for specific broad subjects". Guess what the main page has? News. DYK. Display of high-quality content (i.e., the first couple paragraphs of featured articles). Links to areas where editor collaboration takes place. Links to other Wikimedia projects. Everything that is in this portal and that is largely absent from the article. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:46, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

6. WP:POG guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest)[1] to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal" ... but WP:WikiProject Ethiopia is inactive.

7. If your assumption deletions of other portals bringing views was correct, then we seen some sort of increase over the last 6 months. But I don't see any sustained change in the pageview stats.

If you could identify a group of editors committed to maintaining the portal, then you would have powerful case for retention and I might change my !vote. But all I see is wishful thinking.

--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:21, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How can I seek out such editors without being accused of WP:CANVASSing? UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:28, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No need to seek them out, @UnitedStatesian. Just watch the flurry of editors appearing from WP:WikiProject Ethiopia in response to the notice on Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethiopia/Article alerts. If there's enthusiasm for the portal among the editors working on Ethiopia, then they are bound to come. And if an editor isn't already engaged in Ethiopia, surely you don't want the portal to be "maintained" by editors who lack expertise in the topic? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:52, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I don't care about an editor's expertise in a topic in this case, because portal maintenance, like most Wikipedia maintenance (reverting vandalism, fixing broken links, correcting miscategorizations, fixing typos or copyediting, nominating pages for MfD - clearly no topic expertise is required there - , etc., etc, etc.) does not require any expertise in the subject of the page being maintained. Do you think I am an expert in any subject of a portal (or page, for that matter) that I am maintaining? UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:59, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh dear. @UnitedStatesian, much gnoming doesn't require topic expertise. But effectively maintaining articles requires a lot more than gnoming. Portal maintenance is more than just copy-editing and link-fixing. Some expertise in the subject area is needed to select topics while upholding NPOV, to assess the changing significance of different topics, to identify articles which are becoming unbalanced or are using problematic sources etc.

On top of the sea of abandonment, one of the fundamental problems with portals is that as they have become detached from Wikiprojects, far too many of them have become the playground of editors who lack knowledge of the topic. Any old monkey can throw together a list of topics on a subject area; but actual curation requires actual knowledge. Many of the higher-level portals (those with high readership, broad topics, active WikiProjects well-engaged, etc) do have this sort of expertise on board, and it shows.

By contrast many of the lesser-viewed portals have become the playchild of an editor who finds it easy to do the technical task of assembling a portal, but lacks non-superficial knowledge, and that shows too. I recently spotted a portal on a subject area I know fairly well, where an enthusiastic but consistently dim editor had waded in and built a list of articles which is spectacularly unbalanced in several dimensions (time, POV, and weight). The assumption that portals can be maintained without expertise is scary.

Randy in Boise doesn't often get very far in article space, because on a major topic there are usually enough knowledgeable editors to scrutinise him. But in portalspace, Randy can usually work alone, unchallenged; and when he is challenged the other Randys will pile in to yell "ZomG! War On Portals! Bullying! Down with experts!". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:35, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We obviously disagree (though in fact I think it is good practice to limit a portal's selected articles and pictures to those with FA/FP or GA status, which would I think obviate most if not all of your concerns), but what is important is that the WP:POG guideline is on my side on this one, because it reads "portal maintainers", not "portal maintainers who are experts in the portal's subject." Feel free to propose a change to WP:POG's language, though. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:48, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, the anti-expertise culture is well ingrained in portal land, so I am unsurprised that there is no requirement for expertise. It would badly dent the whole WP:Toy Portals experience. In journalism, the job of selecting which topics to feature goes to one of the most skilled and experienced people in the team. But in en.wp's portalspace, it often goes to one of the least knowledgeable.

And limit a portal's selected articles and pictures to those with FA/FP or GA status resolves some of the problems, but not others. As we saw at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Donald Trump (and also at the other portal I was talking about above), that mode of selection can lead to horrible POV issues. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:06, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per UnitedStatesian above. --Hecato (talk) 14:26, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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.