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. bd2412 T 18:34, 16 October 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:Fascism

Portal:Fascism ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Neglected portal.

• Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 48 for the portal versus 7439 for the parent article, or .645%.
• Selected articles are ancient; there are only ten, and most of them were added in 2009 by vanished user Ecto. Two of them were also inexplicably relocated to the now-deleted Portal:Nazism by Lbertolotti roughly seven-fourths of a year ago.
  • I also caught one error: the BNP lede never mentions their near-fatal membership decline in the 2010s.
• I didn't see a single did-you-know addition nominated after 2008, so all of it qualifies as a violation of WP:TRIVIA.
• Created in March 2006 by DNewhall, who never properly maintained the portal; most maintenance thereafter was done by Ecto less than a year before their vanish request. All other edits since then are either routine maintenance or are just trivial overall.
• The corresponding WikiProject is currently defunct. Need I say more?

So yeah, time to delete this. ToThAc ( talk) 23:11, 3 October 2019 (UTC) reply

• Comment - The question here is whether to delete Portal:Fascism, not whether to delete Fascism, which was an objective of World War Two and is an objective of antifa.
• 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.
• The following table compares this portal against a few other ideological portals and Portal:Politics. Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC) reply

Ideological Portals

Fascism

• Weak Delete - This is a moderately well-viewed portal as portals go. It has somewhat too few articles and not much maintenance. Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC) reply
• Comment to User:BrownHairedGirl - Just delete the backlinks. No real parent portal. Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. 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 long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised at the last minute just to stave off deletion. 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, since they go out of date, preserve potentially inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. -Crossroads- ( talk) 16:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC) reply
• Note on backlinks. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if this discussion is closed as delete, I agree with @ Robert McClenon's proposal that the backlinks should be removed. I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries, but in this case I see no suitable alternative. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 00:08, 11 October 2019 (UTC) reply
• Keep Because the portal is not updated or maintained is not a reason to delete. WP:NOTCLEANUP, additionally low hits, is not a rationale WP:POPULARPAGE. The portal is useful and is here to enhance WP for our readers. Wm335td ( talk) 16:29, 12 October 2019 (UTC) reply

• Comment. You are applying AfD arguments for articles (static entities) with MfD arguments for portals (dynamic entitles). An abandoned article, that is still a notable topic can be maintained (and tagged). An abandoned portal, however, is a different problem and just having a sufficient topic matter is not enough. Britishfinance ( talk) 16:46, 15 October 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete. Largely abandoned with no maintainer(s), and little reader interest. Adds nothing over the mainpage+navboxes (in fact, the topic navboxes are really good far better than the Portal for navigating the topic (and up to date). Nobody seems to want to maintain this portal, and almost nobody seems to want to read it. Its existence only degrades the quality of the decent mainpage+navboxes content in the eyes of the reader. Britishfinance ( talk) 16:46, 15 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:Politics), without creating duplicate entries.

I note that above @ Robert McClenon proposed that the backlinks should just be removed. I considered that option, but since it is conventional to characterise fascism as a political ideology, Portal:Politics is a reasonably good fit. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:06, 15 October 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete. Fascism could be argued to be a broad topic, but the last 6 months of portal MFDs has shown that across a wide range of topic areas, previous notions of a "broad topic" had been drawn far too narrowly to give portals a broad enough scope to attract a decent numbers of both readers and maintainers. This leads to a death spiral for the portal: lack of content and maintenance deters readers, and lack of readers means few potential editors see the portal, and those who do see it are disinclined to devote their energies to an almost-unread page.

Where there is an active WikiProject, that may be a recruiting ground for new maintainers, tho the experience of this year's MFDs has shown that to be a very rare exception to the norm of apathy. In this case WP:WikiProject Politics/Fascism was soft redirected to WP:WikiProject Politics in 2018, long after it became defunct. WT:WikiProject Politics has no mention of this portal, even tough tho this MFD has been listed at WP:WikiProject Politics/Article alerts since 4 October [1] (11 days ago). I searched the archives of WikiProject Politics's talk page for "Portal:Fascism", and got no hits. The project seems completely uninterested.

So I see no reasonable chance of this cycle of neglect breaking.

Meanwhile the portal has a small set of articles, most of them outdated content forks. The head article Fascism is a fine B-class article, with an impressive set of navboxes. The core portal functions of navigation and showcasing are much better served by the actively-maintained head article than by the long-neglected, stunted portal. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:53, 15 October 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete and Merge any practicable potential content into Portal:Politics. The lack of a corresponding WikiProject violates my proposal for whether a topic should have a portal, plus there's potential WP:NPOV issues here. SportingFlyer T· C 05:22, 16 October 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete outright for being a suspicious collection of probable WP:NNPOV which can only produce harm. I'm puzzled by Portal:Fascism/DYK, which devotes considerable space to biographies such as Francis Bull and Gunvald Tomstad for no discernible reason. Out of thousands of notable people involved in world war two, the portal managed to pick a few whose articles can be described as lacking sources or being stubs, and then proceeded to pick semi-random factoids from them, with the result that any possible relevance to the topic of fascism was reduced to merely homeopathic levels. Nemo 08:33, 16 October 2019 (UTC) reply