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 | yak _ 06:56, 30 July 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:Wyoming

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

Delete this Abandoned micro-portal. Only 4 selected articles and 1 selected biog. No new content added since June 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 11 pageviews per day, compared with 3713 views per day for the head article Wyoming. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 15:32, 25 June 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete Has had time to mature, which hasn't happened. Mark Schierbecker ( talk) 17:21, 25 June 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete - Maybe waiting for portals to "mature" is Waiting for Godot.

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 Portals that are not maintained are useless, and, if the information that is facing the reader becomes out-of-date, they are worse than useless, because anyone can edit an article, but heritage portals with subpages contain old copies of articles that require special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) 16:36, 26 June 2019 (UTC) reply

• Keep: This portal contains basic information about the state but needs updating and improvement. It would be far better to mark this portal as needing updating and improvement rather than simply deleting it. It is far easier to rebuild a portal than to create a portal from scratch. For the status of regional portals, see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 14:28, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

No. It is easier to build a new portal from scratch than to try to improve an existing portal if the existing portal has a failed architecture that is an honorable experiment that did not work. Robert McClenon ( talk) 04:47, 4 July 2019 (UTC) reply

It's easy to write of updating and improvement, but the reality is that this is just another of the many hundred of portals which languished for a decade without being improve or updated. It gets too few readers to attract the efforts of editors, so if it is kept it will simply continue to rot.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Buaidh's comment is just more of the magical thinking which a decade ago saw editors create hundreds of portals on a high-maintenance model ... but a decade later we can see the evidence that there simply aren't enough editors willing and able to maintain this portal. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:08, 1 July 2019 (UTC) reply

If an editor wants to create a new geographic portal when a previous one has been deleted, they do not need to start from scratch. Requests for Undeletion is to the left and Deletion Review is to the right. Robert McClenon ( talk) 05:49, 2 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. Also, it's easier to update an existing portal compared to creating a new one from scratch. Sincerely, North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:28, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

No. It is easier to build a new portal from scratch than to try to improve an existing portal if the existing portal has a failed architecture that is an honorable experiment that did not work. Robert McClenon ( talk) 04:47, 4 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) 15:58, 3 July 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete Like Portal:Vermont, an abandoned out-of-date cut-and-paste of the main article+navbox that adds little to a reader. Again, an abandoned portal is not the same as an abandoned article. The abandoned article has passed the criteria for existence, and if well written, can still be useful to a reader. However, the abandoned portal has lost the reason for its existence, and only presents the reader with a perception of Wikipedia that it is a dying platform. While the main Wyoming article may not be tagged for issues, having scanned down through it, I can see there are long passages without any citations or references – how would a reader trust our portal when the main article is suspect? A decade of effective abandonment (as shown by edits), and effective rejection by readers (as shown by views), is sufficient proof that this does not work as a portal. Again, there is no need for Wikipedia to score " own goals against itself. Britishfinance ( talk) 18:15, 4 July 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete worthless junk, six selected articles and one selected biography. Catfurball ( talk) 20:00, 26 July 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.