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: no consensus. What a mess this discussion was. With all the hyper-extended arguments, and the canvassing of hundreds of editors, this discussion became doomed and it's not really possible to find a consensus within it. No prejudice against renomination. ‑Scottywong | express _ 06:51, 30 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:Colorado

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

Abandoned micro-portal. Only 2 selected articles and 2 selected biogs. No new content added since 2008‎.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But in practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers for over a decade, and it also has almost no readers: in Jan–Feb 2019, it got only 24 pageviews per day, compared with 3,625 views per day for the head article Colorado. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 15:48, 25 June 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete Has had time to mature, which hasn't happened. Mark Schierbecker ( talk) 17:27, 25 June 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete - Portals are not wine or cheese and do not improve with age, but inferior wine does not improve with age either.

Oh. Wait a minute. Colorado's best known agricultural product isn't wine or cheese, but beef. Beef has a limited maturation schedule also. It only improves for about a year while it is on the hoof, and then is only dry-aged for weeks, and then has a shelf life of about a week after it is cut and packaged. Robert McClenon ( talk) 17:54, 26 June 2019 (UTC) reply

This is an unmaintained and little-viewed portal on a state of the United States. The following is a listing of the least-viewed state portals:

A complete listing of state portals with metrics can be seen at WP:US State Portal Metrics. Portals that are not maintained are useless, and, if the information that is facing the reader becomes out-of-date, they are worse than useless, because anyone can edit an article, but heritage portals with subpages contain old copies of articles that require special knowledge to edit.

A state of the United States may be considered a priori to be a broad subject area, but this portal has been shown a posteriori not to be attracting readers or a portal maintainer. A portal is a miniature Main Page and requires a substantial investment in volunteer time.

This portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer who is willing to invest the time to support a miniature Main Page under the portal guidelines that are in effect at the time. Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:37, 26 June 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep: I update this portal on a regular basis as part of WikiProject Colorado. Updates are normally made to portal subpages and seldom to the portal page itself. All the data on this portal is current. We post all Colorado Wikimedia events on this portal. This deletion request seems to be aimed at me personally for opposing portal deletions on principle. For the status of regional portals, see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 14:35, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Buaidh, grow up and drop the victim spiel. It got old a long time ago.

This portal is one of dozens nominated for deletion on grounds of abandonment, and I was not aware of your involvement until you mentioned it.

I have no idea what pages you claim to be updating, but the fact remains that as stated in the nomination this portal has Only 2 selected articles and 2 selected biogs. No new content added since 2008‎. I checked the content subpages, and that was the basis of the nomiantion.

If you want a noticeboard, you already ave Wikipedia:WikiProject Colorado. Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Computer graphics and its poor navboxes Template:Computer graphics. Any use as a noticeboard is a subsidiary purpose, and is insufficient to justify the existence of a portal. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:19, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

At 71, I've probably grown up as much as I'm going to. The fact that you folks have no idea how portals are updated raises a serious question about deleting hundreds of portals. Your portal deletion cadre is well intended but seriously misinformed. If you don't understand how portals work, you probably should not be deleting them. The Colorado article and WikiProject Colorado can provide most of the Portal:Colorado information, but there is no link between the article and the WikiProject. This means that users who wish to contribute have no direction to the WikiProject. That is a great way to reduce user interest in participating. I guess you only want super-editors participating. This super-editor has about had his fill. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 19:10, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Buaidh, that's a pity. Some more maturity would be v helpful.

As you well know, I understand perfectly well how portals are updated: by editing sub-pages. Sadly it happens all too rarely.

In this case, eleven years after the portal was created, it still has Only 2 selected articles and 2 selected biogs, and no new articles have been added since 20-08. I am sorry that you find this simple fact difficult to understand, but it's verifiably true.

I just checked your claim that you update this portal on a regular basis. You portalspace edits this year show a bunch of tweaks to Portal:Colorado/State Facts and Portal:Colorado/Events.

Portal:Colorado/State Facts is simply a badly-formatted, unsourced fork of the infobox of Colorado. Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", but a malformed, unsourced fork adds no value.

As to the events page, that advertising belongs on the project page.-- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:29, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Some time ago I deleted the selected articles and selected biographies because they did not seem relevant to the portal. If it will change your mind, I will be happy to reinsert them or anything else you feel is lacking. Give me a list. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 19:36, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep THere may not be a lot of updating on these portals, I don't think deletion is the answer at this point. It may be worth looking in to what can be done to make them more active. - Scarpy ( talk) 20:06, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Scarpy, it has been abandoned for ten years with a pathetically small set of topics.

If you don't want it deleted, what's your alternative?

Pray for it to magically improve itself?

Wait for a hundred years?

Building a portal which actually adds value takes a lot of work, and the historical pattern is that few portals attract enough editors to do that work. So unless you have some actual plan for change, keeping it just prolongs the waste of readers' time. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:24, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ BrownHairedGirl: Please show us what you consider to be a portal that adds real value, and we can upgrade many of these portals to meet your standards. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 02:36, 2 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Buaidh, the question of what makes a decent portal has been discussed ad nauseam, so if you aren't already ware of what make a decent portal, then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Anyway, here are two examples:

1. Portal:Military history of Australia, with about 800 subpages
2. Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, taking a very different approach, kinda like a mega-navbox.

The Australian one has has a large team of editors working on it. It must have taken several thousand person-hours of work to build.

Something like Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern could possibly be built in a few dozen hours, and will require less maintenance.

And that's the problem. As @ Robert McClenon often notes, the multi-subpage model of portals are designed to be like a topic-specific version of the Main page, but most portals lack the resources required by that model.

The main page has several teams of editors working on it continuously; I guess that there is about 100 person hours of work going into it every day. Some multi-page portals are effectively maintained with less energy than the main page, but they do require significant ongoing effort.

The mega-navbox model needs less maintenance, but it does still need some work: ongoing disambiguation, addition of new articles, etc.

So whatever approach is taken, making a decent portal requires a huge amount of work to create, and a significant amount of ongoing maintenance. The reason that most portals are in such poor state is that hardly anyone wants to do that work ... which is unsurprising, because nearly all portals get abysmal viewing figures. Why put lots of energy into a type of page which almost nobody reads, when similar effort applied to articles gets a much higher return?

So Buaidh's promise that we can upgrade many of these portals to meet your standards looks fanciful. It looks to me like an assurance given by someone with little or no idea of how much work is involved or how low the returns are.

Are you really sure that you are up for this? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 12:48, 2 July 2019 (UTC) reply

An all or nothing approach to portals seems a little impractical. If the same criteria were applied to articles, we'd loose about 95%. Right now I'm sick and up to my eyeballs in other WikiProjects. I'll see what we can do. Thanks for your helpful reply.  Buaidh  talk contribs 00:13, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Sigh.

1. I am not advocating an an all or nothing approach to portals. I am trying to uphold the core principle of WP:PORTAL: "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". In other words, the purpose of a portal is to offer a lot more than the main page.
2. Portals are not articles, so they have different deletion criteria. A portal is a device for navigating and/or showcasing the encyclopedic content which resides in articles. Just as categories are routinely deleted if they don't serve that purpose, portals which don't serve their purpose are routinely deleted at MFD — about 4,800 such redundant portals have deleted this year.

The problem here is that this portal is a massively degraded version of the head article Colorado: it doesn't even pass the bare minimum standards.

In any case, two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers nearly all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer (I have explained them below in my reply to NA1K). That means that the bar has been raised significantly: for a portal to actually add value in 2019, it has to do a lot more than a portal would have had to do five years ago. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:11, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep and tag with the {{ Update}} template. Then notify relevant Wikiprojects that the portal would benefit from updating. I consider U.S. states to meet WP:POG guidelines in terms of being broad enough in topical scope to qualify for a portal. Happy editing, North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:25, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

NA1K's personal view of the guidelines is not supported by the long-standing text of the guidelines. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Per the evidence above this one has not attracted either readers or maintainers.

XFD decisions should be made on the basis of actual guidelines, not on the basis of one editor's desire to apply the Humpty Dumpty principle that ""When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." @ Northamerica1000 is an admin, and should know better than to try reducing this discussion to Alice in Wonderland, so I hope that the closing admin will discount this flight of fancy.

In other discussions, NA1K has offered to to do a rapid update of the portal. I note that there is no such offer here, and instead NA1K proposes tagging the portal to ask someone else to do the update.

The that a solution lies in tagging a portal with {{ update}} is risible, and it is demonstrably made in bad faith. As NA1K well knows, very few editors work on portals: they are complex to edit, and have low readership, so editors rightly choose to put their energies elsewhere. That is why the majority of portals which existed a year ago had rotted for years or even for a decade: there are not enough willing maintainers to sustain such a wide number of portals.

The idea that any portal will magically attract maintainers might have made sense a decade ago in the era when the editor base was rapidly growing ... but n 2019, with editor numbers much much lower, it's not just a flight of fancy or magical thinking: it's a straightforward denial of reality.

What this portal needs, like other abandoned portals, is not just two hours of rapid update to raise it just above a deletion threshold. what it needs is:

1. updating
2. a complete overhaul to avoid replicating the functionality provided by the new wiki technologies (see below)
3. ongoing maintenance

@ Northamerica1000 is bringing here the approach used in their days with the WP:Article Rescue Squadron, which was to preserve some stub on a barely notable topic by adding a few sourced factoids which brought it just over the WP:Notability threshold. That approach in article space just left us with perma-stubs, and when applied to portals it just preserves abandoned portals to rot again.

NA1K repeatedly says of abandoned portals that "there is only so much one person can do", and I agree entirely. One person may be able to rush around like a firefighter on amphetamines and push a series of portals over the threshold, but that one person cannot maintain the dozens of portals which have no other maintainer.

NA1K's approach is to preserve portals at any cost, regardless of quality and regardless of whether they are maintained. They objected angrily to populating Category:All portals because it was "being used by deletionists". They propose the propose deletion of Category:Abandoned country portals, because they prefer not to identify abandon portals.

The lead of WP:POG has said since 2006 "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create". Note that phrase "kept up to date". Not updated once in a drive-by-session, but regularly maintained. NA1K is not even offering to do that.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).

1. mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
2. automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game, and NA1K doesn't even suggest any way in which they intend to avoid duplicating the new built-in features.

After a decade of widespread abandonment of portals, hundreds of recent MFDs show that consensus has turned against indefinitely keeping this sort of abandoned junk in the hope that every few years it may get the sort of sporadic update which NA1K promises. It is time for NA1K to stop defending the junk. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 15:55, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ BrownHairedGirl: Just for my information, how many first level portals have been deleted and how many still exist. Thanks,  Buaidh  talk contribs 16:34, 4 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Regional portals do differ from other portals in that Wikipedia users live in those regions. While interest in general subject portals is driven by interest in those subjects, interest in regional portals is driven by both regional interest and regional pride. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 16:34, 4 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Currently, 1450 articles link to Portal:Colorado. The portal has had 1012 page views in the past 30 days. The portal currently has 48 subpages. For other regional portals, see User:Buaidh/Geographic_portals. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 17:09, 4 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Since User:Buaidh says correctly that regional portals differ from other portals in that users live in them and have regional pride, I would be interested in comments on my recent essay contrasting support for regional portals with the idea that portals should attract readers and portal maintainers. Robert McClenon ( talk) 15:37, 5 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Buaidh, the fact that people live is regions irrelevant. They also live in towns , villages, streets and buildings, and we don't have portals for those.

There are many factors which may drive a reader's interest in a topic, and geography is only one of the factors. Personally, I read articles about places which are not near where I live, because I know my own area already.

As noted in the nomination, in Jan–Feb 2019, the portal got only 24 pageviews per day, compared with 3,625 views per day for the head article Colorado. The fact that 1450 articles link to the portal means that there is no possibility of under-advertisment being used as a defence for the lack of interest. The portal is well-advertised, but despite that and Buaidh's claim of regional pride, the fact is that readers do not read the portal. They prefer the article by a ratio of about 150:1.

I think that what Buaidh really means is that he personally has pride in his region, and believes that they should therefore be a portal about his region. But we don't create Wikipedia for editors; we create it for readers. And the readers don't want it.-- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 12:16, 6 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep all or delete all state portals After reading this discussion, I think the question that needs to be asked is: "Do US State portals add value to Wikipedia?" If the answer is yes, keep them all; and if the answer is no, delete them all. On a personal note, however, I don't know what User:BrownHairedGirl's feud with User:Buaidh is all about (it certainly appears to be deeper than this one disputed deletion), but many of these comments seem highly inappropriate. Starting a discussion with "grow up and drop the victim spiel" is, frankly, very saddening to see from an administrator and definitely doesn't appear to be proper WP:WQ. -- Pennstatephil ( talk) 15:53, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply
  • @ Pennstatephil: I did not start the discussion with that comment. I made it in reply to Buaidh because I have learnt the hard way through many unpleasant encounters with Buaidh that his response to any proposed action he doesn't like consists of three factors: 1/ malicious allegations of bad faith against those who propose or support the actions; 2/ personal attacks on the individuals or group of editors with whom he disagrees; 3/ when challenged to desist, he then plays the victim card and tries draw attention away from his misconduct by eliciting sympathy through an announcement that he is dying.

I have seen this cycle often enough that I am no longer will to play the game. So per WP:SPADE, I chose to call it out at the start, when Buaidh made his unfounded allegation.

Note that since then, Buaidh has doubled down on his disruptive antics by abusing the mass-messaging tool to directly message 229 editors for a purpose other than which they signed up for, viz, Buaidh's blatant WP:CANVASSing of this discussion. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:13, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Regional Portals

Some editors have stated that particular levels of regions should have portals. User:Kusma wrote (in April, in an MFD): "all countries should have portals". User:Northamerica1000 wrote: "I consider U.S. states to meet WP:POG guidelines in terms of being broad enough in topical scope to qualify for a portal." Such statements raise a two-part question, having to do with people, and with policies.

Who Should Do What?

The first part of the question is: Who is expected to do what in order to provide the portal? Should Wikipedia provide and maintain a portal? Should Wikipedia provide a portal without maintaining it? Should Wikipedia provide a portal, contingent on having a portal maintainer and a portal maintenance plan? Should the Internet, of which Wikipedia is a prominent site, provide a portal? If only that, the government of the nation, state, or province can and almost certainly does provide and maintain a portal in the form of its web site, as do lesser regions such as counties, cantons, districts, communes, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and villages.

If Wikipedia is expected to provide and maintain a portal, how can that obligation be reconciled with Wikipedia is not compulsory? If Wikipedia is only expected to provide an empty portal, what good is that? It appears that the implication is that Wikipedia is expected to provide a portal to a maintainer and to continue to keep the portal facing outward toward the readers whether or not it is being maintained. Portal advocates who think that particular levels of regions "should have" portals should clarify what obligation they are implying and on whom. Robert McClenon ( talk) 15:36, 5 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Impact on Policies and Guidelines

The second part of the question is how the idea that countries or states "should have" portals should be reflected in Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. At present, the page that is designated as the Portal Guidelines states that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract readers and portal maintainers. Portal advocates have focused on the reference to "broad subject areas" and have disregarded the two-part reference to readers and portal maintainers. At present, the status of the portal guidelines is in dispute. Those who would like to retain existing regional portals, and possibly create more regional portals, may either deal with the existing guidelines or propose to revise them. If they prefer to deal with the existing guidelines, there are two issues. The first is that the status of the guidelines is in doubt, appearing to have been a failed proposal. The second is that the existing document refers to readers and maintainers, who cannot simply be assumed or willed into existence. Since the present (contested) guidelines refer not simply to broad subject areas, but to broad subject areas that will attract readers and portal maintainers, any specific portal can be shown by observation not to be attracting readers or maintainers.

The other option for the advocates of regional portals, or for anyone who wants to provide better guidelines with regard to portals, would be to publish a Request for Comments to implement new portal guidelines, either the old guidelines, or a slightly revised version of the old guidelines, or an entirely new set of guidelines. In that case, advocates of regional portals should be on notice that the new guidelines either should explicitly identify certain subjects that are considered portal-worthy even without maintenance, or it can be understood that regional portals, like other subject areas, are only considered to be broad subject areas if they demonstrate that they attract readers and maintainers. Robert McClenon ( talk) 15:36, 5 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Discussion

Thank you. We've created a regional WikiProject or work group for every member state of the United Nations and many dependent states and regions. It is the responsibility of each regional WikiProject to maintain its own portal. The WikiProjects for small and non-English-speaking countries usually have very few members, and in some cases, no active members. This may make portal maintenance very difficult for these WikiProjects. These small and non-English-speaking regions are, however, precisely the regions from which we are most interested in attracting new editors. These regions often have a disproportionately minor coverage in Wikipedia. (Wikipedia knows every time Cardi B sneezes, but seems to care little about Eswatini.) If you look at User:Buaidh/Geographic portals, many of the deleted portal are from these small and non-English-speaking regions. I think WikiProject Portals should make their top priority to assist these undermaned regions rebuild their portals. I think the creation of a Regional portals work group under WikiProject Portals would be a great idea and I would certainly help with this effort.

Every article about a region should link to the regional portal in the See also section, and most do. If that portal is deleted or redirected, it can cause user confusion. Every article about a region should also link to the regional WikiProject on the talk page, but many novice or casual users may not realize this. This means that the regional portal link may be the best way to direct these users to the regional WikiProject. While many people accuse me of being a cheerleader, I think every regional portal should encourage visitors to participate in the regional WikiProject and Wikimedia events.

On a personal level, I was not involved in the creation of Portal:Colorado, but I’ve voluntarily overseen the portal for about nine years. My only activity has been to keep the portal up to date and add a few minor features. Until, User:BrownHairedGirl gave me some pointers above, I was ignorant of what a portal should be. I exert most of my efforts trying to coordinate regional WikiProjects and their templates and categories. When I saw regional portals being deleted, I was outraged because so much of my work links to the regional portals. Now I understand why they were deleted, but I do feel it is far better to rebuild these regional portals rather than recreate them from scratch. If this is too much work for Wikipedia, then we need to rethink how we should reach out to users in small and non-English-speaking regions. (My brain is very geographically oriented. I care very much about the residents of the Forgotten Regions.)

If we need to add guidelines specifically for the regional portals, I think we should. What are your thoughts? Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 18:10, 5 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Buaidh, we don't need more instruction creep. We have a guideline already: WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This portal has not attracted maintainers, and it has also been shunned by readers. Which part of that is so hard to understand? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 12:18, 6 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Buaidh: I'm a resident of Colorado, a friend of Buaidh's, one of the leaders of the Wikimedians of Colorado User Group, and represented them at Wikimedia Conference 2018. I'm glad to have learned a number of interesting things about this complicated arena of Wikipedia from the comments here, having had only a smattering of experiences with portals over the years. In terms of helping under-resourced regions, offhand, it seems to me that we can be most helpful by pulling together relevant data, experiments and the like, and present it to them, and then ask them what they think. While there may be some who get portal fever, my guess is that both those sorts of analyses, and their thoughts and reactions, would mirror the findings that BrownHairedGirl and Robert McClenon have nicely documented here. I.e. I guess they would leverage their expertise more effectively in the world, and better represent their regions, by focusing first on the relevant regional and cultural articles. That would leverage the pageview trends as well as the new MediaWiki software features which provide an automatic rich media experience based on simple article links. And if they provide navboxes, and integrate them with WikiData, there is hope that many Wikipedia language projects around the world will automatically get articles based on their implicit metadata editing. The Catalan Wikipedia is an amazing example of that. That may rely on work in this English Wikipedia to improve syncing between our navboxes and Wikidata, but my main point is that we can do things to help them leverage their resources which may well be more effective than encouraging portal work. ★NealMcB★ ( talk) 03:27, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Thank you. I don't wish to spend the rest of my life defending portals. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 03:41, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Buaidh: the choice to spend the rest of [your] life defending portals is wholly yours. You can stop it any time you choose. I don't think you will choose it, because as I noted below the whole focus of your contribs to this site is building a social network (contrary to WP:NOTSOCIAL) ... but your decision to spend your energies getting outraged about the removal of unused pointless annexes to the encyclopedia is your decision, and yours alone.

So it is notable, tho wholly unsurprising, that you entirely ignored the central point of Nealmcb's recommendation that editors should be focusing first on the relevant regional and cultural articles.

Nealmcb is right that tools such as Wikidata are how connections are best made, and existing content better leveraged. But instead of looking at how to actually serve our readers and fulfill Wikipedia's mission of sharing knowledge, Buaidh's focus on his social club is leading him to expend vast amount of emotional energy getting het up about the deletion of an almost-unused annex to WP ... and now in easting vast amounts of his scarce time on this planet in creating a forest of unsourced, redundant content forks to serve up to the portal's risbily small readership through a completely misconceived structure.

(The subpage model is so fundamentally flawed that it would make a great study in the dogged pursuit of complete failure by editors who willfully ignore facts because they are fixated on pursuing their obsession. It relies on content forks; it is ridiculously hard to maintain and or watchlist; it gets out of date unless maintained; the excerpts are redundant because the Wikimedia software creates automatic excerpts for each link; it does not provide the reader with even a count of how many topics are available, let alone a clear list of available topics; and to even get a lucky dip of whatever other topics ate available, readers have to do the bizarre and counter-intuitive step of refreshing the page).

So yes, editors who want to serve readers will inded follow Nealmcb's sound advice, and work on articles. But those like Buaidh who are just here to build a social club will continue to ignore that advice. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 17:22, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ BrownHairedGirl: Thank you for reading my comments. I have tried to explain why regional portals are highly important to the regional WikiProjects. I cannot change your mind, but I will strive to improve this portal until it is deleted. I think we can make this worthy portal.  Buaidh  talk contribs 18:05, 6 July 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Buaidh: the underlying problem here is that you treat Wikipedia as social media. Your efforts are all focused on userboxes, Wikiprojects, and the categories and templates which interlink them. To that end you have created an impenetrable walled garden of pages to facilitate editors who want to festoon their userpages with userboxes and categorise themselves.

By contrast, your articlespace contributions are almost entirely trivial, consisting overwhelmingly of adding items to Timeline of Colorado history.

So it is wholly unsurprising that your explanation above is almost entirely about editors and WikPeojects. That's what you do: editors and WikiPojects.

However, your comment entirely omits recognition of the core fact that Wikipedia is not social media. It is an encyclopedia.

The purpose of a portal is to assist readers, not editors. But your comment above is entirely the opposite: it is all about driving editors and readers to WikiProjects, and to encourage visitors to participate in the regional WikiProject and Wikimedia events.

So, as with everything else you, your outrage here and your serial misconduct (spamming, canvassing, making false and malicious allegations) derives from the core problems that you are not actually here to build an encyclopedia: you are primarily here to build a social club, apparently with a big emphasis on keeping it local enough that you have meetups.

Hence your demand that the portals project should make their top priority to assist these undermaned regions rebuild their portals. (Aside: toparks for sexist language. If that's what you were aiming for, you got a bullseye.)

It would be hard to design any workplan worse suited to helping our readers. Look at the graph above: you want the portal project to concentrate its effort on the extreme right of the graph, on the least-viewed portals, and you want them to do that not to help readers, but as a morale booster for the editors who don't exist.

Your friend User:Nealmcb commented above and wisely recommended putting effort into articles, not portals. That's very sound advice, because readers read articles not portals, by a ratio of over 100:1 in the case of head articles alone, so working on actual articles is how we serve readers.

It's long past time that those like Buaidh who want to use Wikipedia as a social club were sent off to some separate site -- maybe called something like an en.WikiFans.orf -- rather than filling up the enyclopedia's workspaces with your focus on a social club. Sadly, Buaidh is very clearly WP:NOTHERE to build an encyclopedia. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:53, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Outlines and Indexes

Two valuable guides to articles about Colorado are found in the Resources section of Portal:Colorado. The Outline of Colorado lists Colorado-related articles by subject area. The Index of Colorado-related articles lists articles about Colorado alphabetically. These two resources are valuable to anyone searching for specific Colorado information. WikiProject Outlines supports subject outlines and WikiProject Indexes supports subject indexes. Not all regional WikiProjects have embraced outlines and indexes, although we have encouraged them to do so.

Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern which User:BrownHairedGirl cited above uses an attractive but abbreviated outline of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern-related articles. Should we elevate or incorporate the Outline of Colorado and the Index of Colorado-related articles into the Colorado portal? Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 22:09, 5 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Please view the current Portal:Colorado page information. The Colorado portal is being maintained and is being watched. (1265 views in the past 30 days.) Thank you for drawing attention to the Colorado portal. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 17:25, 7 July 2019 (UTC) reply

While the portal is at MFD and being scrutinised by editors, pageviews are distorted by that editorial scrutiny. That's why in MFD discussions I use the pageview figures for the period 01/01/2019 - 28/02/2019, before the intense scrutiny began. Also, we use the daily average rather than total pageviews, so that different periods can be easily compared. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 18:46, 7 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Blatant canvassing

• Closing admin please note that this discussion has been the subject of extensive canvassing by User:Buaidh, on 7 July 2019‎ (today).

Buaidh abused the mass message delivery service by using the Wikipedia:Meetup/Colorado/Invitation list to send a message which was unrelated to the lists's purpose of invitations to meetups. Buaidh abused this facility to send a message [1] to 229 editors in clear violation of several parts of WP:CANVASS:

1. Excessive cross-posting
2. Campaigning: the message: is clearly biased
3. Votestacking: the message is clearly partisan.

This is by far the worst case of canvassing by excessive cross-posting that I have seen in 13 years on Wikipedia. So i will take it to ANI later. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:17, 7 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Blatant harassment

• Closing administrator please note: When a portal is nominated for deletion, editors may attempt to improve the portal and thus avoid the need for deletion. I sent a message this morning asking WikiProject Colorado editors for assitance in upgrading and maintaining this portal. We are meeting this Saturday at my home. I did not ask for any comments to this forum. Please see User:Buaidh/letter.

I have been the target of demeaning comments and general harrasment by the user above. The user above has made numerous unwanted edits to this portal that she wishes to delete. I want all this to stop.  Buaidh  talk contribs 19:31, 7 July 2019 (UTC) reply

The concept of unwanted edits is pure WP:OWNership.

You used a list whose purpose is invitations to meetups. Your message did not mention a meetup. That is abuse of the mass messaging system.

Objecting to blatant canvassing is not harassment.

Objecting to the removal of cleanup tags is not harassment.

What is harassment is the barrage of personal attacks launched by Buaidh, including the maliciously false allegation that even nominating the portal for deletion was harassment of him. [2]

Note that Buaidh pulled the same sort of stunt at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Maine, making a barrage of personalised attacks on those who supported deleting that one.

The next stage in this cycle is that Buaidh will announce that he is dying. This is somehow supposed to redeem his repeated abuse of consensus-forming processes, and justify his subsequent whining when called out on his misconduct. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 22:00, 7 July 2019 (UTC) reply

I ask that anyone interested in this mini-feud compare the tone of our respective comments. I have repeatedly tried to reach an amicable compromise. I have no grievance with the above user. I merely want to avoid the deletion of Portal:Colorado. I wish all this would stop. I have other regional WikiProjects to attend to. Thank you,  Buaidh  talk contribs 02:33, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

This is the standard cycle of Buaidh conduct:

1. Mkae baseless allegations against other editors
2. Flagrantly abuse wikipedia processes
3. Denounce challenges to the misconduct.

If you want this to stop, Buaidh, the solution is in your hands. Clean up your act: Drop the WP:OWNership, stop making false and malicious allegations of harassment, stop spamming. Stop canvassing. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:07, 8 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep WP:POG doesn't say that portals have to be updated frequently or get large numbers of page views. It does say that portals should be about broad, diverse topics, but US states meet that standard (at least as it is usually interpreted). The fact this hasn't got many readers or maintainers is more down to the failure of portals as a general concept rather than anything with this particular subject. A decision to get rid of portals as a concept would have to be taken at a higher level than individual MfDs, and the last time this was discussed the decision was not to get rid of them. Hut 8.5 06:57, 9 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Actually, @ Hut 8.5, I'm afraid that all the points yo make about the guidelines are wrong.

The lead of WP:POG says "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create".

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 12:34, 11 July 2019 (UTC) reply

I think that's an overly generous interpretation. The first sentence says that unmaintained portals are more likely to be deleted, but that isn't a statement that a portal can or should be deleted just for being unmaintained. If that was what was meant then I'm not sure why it doesn't say that explicitly. The second sentence says that portals have to be about broad subject areas, because these are more likely to attract readers and maintainers, but this doesn't mean a portal which doesn't get much of either has to be deleted. I suspect that most portals on Wikipedia don't get many views or frequent updates, but the community has rejected the idea of getting rid of portals in general and that's something we have to abide by here. I appreciate the aim here but I think it's better done as part of a change to the guideline or an RfC instead of piecemeal MfDs. Hut 8.5 21:14, 11 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Status of regional portals

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.