Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Carolina

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. ‑Scottywong | [babble] || 18:18, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:North Carolina

Neglected/undeveloped portal. Only one selected article that was last updated in February 2013. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 07:33, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Merge and redirect to Portal:United States. We need to rethink our approach here. Rather than deleting content outright, we should generally be merging unsustainable portals up to sustainable ones. bd2412 T 13:18, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BD2412: I strongly oppose both merger and redirection:

Merger just means preserving a set outdated of content forks, which is a very bad idea.
Redirection means that portals links will display a link to a portal which doesn't exist, and then surprise the reader by opening up a portal on a broader topic. Nearly all such redirects have been deleted at RFD for just that reason. It's much better to simply replace the links, as I proposed below. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:01, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:00, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Perfectly good portal. The fact that the selected article hasn't been updated recently should be taken up on that article's talk page. Bermicourt (talk) 16:25, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A mere one selected article makes a Perfectly good portal?????? Really??? Am I missing some sort of sarcasm or comedy here? Even POG set a minimum of twenty articles, which itself was risibly low.

The fact that a noted enthusiast for portals is prepared to described this still-born-then-abandoned junk as a perfectly good portal speaks tragic volumes about why WikiProject Portals has allowed portalspace to rot for a decade without even systematic quality assessment.

After all these months of scrutinising portals at MFD, it is utterly ridiculous that any editor would come to MFD to claim that a portal which only ever displays one article. How on earth does that help a reader? it would be significantly better to simply redirect the whole portal to that one article, because the reader would at least see the current version of the whole page, rather than just an aged content fork of its lead. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:38, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Bermicourt, are you trolling? Because it seems highly unlikely to me that that is your legitimate held belief. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 22:40, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nominator, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this condition. Low page views (17/day, compared to 3,637/day for North Carolina) and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated 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 via merger. A redirect would confuse readers; it is better to replace with a link to the next most specific portal. The assertion that this portal is "perfectly good" is a sign of very low standards for portals. -Crossroads- (talk) 01:59, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Tagged US Portals

Title	Portal Page Views	Article Page Views	Percent	Comments	Articles	Notes	Baseline	Deleted	Type
South Carolina	12	2409	0.50%	Originated 2007. Originator inactive since 2013. Last maintenance 2009; articles last tweaked 2016.	4		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
Kentucky	14	2927	0.48%	Originated 2006 by editor who last edited 2017. 10 articles, 10 attractions, 14 biographies, 11 cities, no substantive maintenance since 2011.	45	Fairly complete calendar, many DYKs.	Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
Nevada	14	2600	0.54%	Originated 2009. 21 articles created 2009, no substantive maintenance since 2009.	21		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
North Carolina	16	3747	0.43%	Originator last edited in 2011 after starting portal in 2006. One featured article at a time without other articles, last tweaked 2013.	1		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
Louisiana	16	3186	0.50%	Originator came in 2007, did their thing in 2007, went in 2007. 22 articles and bios originated 2007, some unchanged, some tweaked in or before 2017, no substantive maintenance.	22		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
Tennessee	18	2972	0.61%	Originated 2007, originator inactive since 2016. Last maintenance 2011 on six articles and five bios.	11		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
Arkansas	20	2583	0.77%	Originated 2008. Originator quit in 2018. Last substantive maintenance in 2009, some articles tweaked. One article tweaked Oct 2019 after MFD.	21		Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	State
United States	235	42004	0.56%	Originated 2005 by sporadic editor.	101	Complete calendar. Some articles have obsolete information, such as listing Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State.	Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	Country

Comment - A complete list of metrics for US state portals, including deleted portals, is available at Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

North Carolina

Delete - Only one article, no maintenance, low viewing.
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.
I respectfully disagree with User:BD2412 about changing our deletions of portals to upmerges. They caution against deleting content outright, but portals should not provide unique content. Portals provide arbitrarily selected content that often becomes outdated. There is no need to preserve and build up portals that have what BHG properly calls a Rube Goldberg machine structure. Adding more arbitrarily selected portions of articles to an existing arbitrary selection of portions of articles just increases the Rube Goldberg factor. It will not make the higher-level portals sustainable. The proposed upmerging of portals should not be confused with the upward redirection of backlinks by BHG.
It isn't clear how a portal with only one article is "perfectly good" except as an example of what not to do. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete states don't need portals period.Catfurball (talk) 19:15, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nominator. Yet another severely neglected and barely read portal on a sub-national region.

The last 6 months of MFDs have repeatedly shown that a sub-national region is very rarely a broad enough topic to sustain a portal. These narrow-topic portals attract neither readers nor maintainers, creating a spiral of decay ... and the complete lack of interest from the WikiProject gives no reason to hope that this might change. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:25, 8 October 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.