Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Chad

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. — JJMC89 (T·C) 06:15, 20 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Chad

Narrow topic, Long-abandoned with low readership, recently given a 31-minute drive-by makeover by a portal fan, but with no identified maintainer, and no active WikiProject to support it.

Chad covers a huge land area of 1,284,000 km2 (about 15 times the size of Ireland), and has a population of 13 million. So it's not a tiny place ... but sadly, Wikipedia's well-documented systemic bias against Africa means that Wikipedia's coverage of Chad is very poor. Category:WikiProject Chad articles has a total of only 1272 articles, and Category:Chad articles by quality shows a very small set of decent-quality articles: 1 FA-class, 8 GA-class, 22 B-class and 41 C-class. That's very slim pickings from which to build a portal.

WikiProject Chad articles by quality Refresh
FA	A	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???	Total
0	0	13	33	88	315	967	0	71	1,085	6	2	4	0	9	64	79	0	4	2,740

The portal also has abysmally low readership. The Jan–Jun 2019 daily average of 11 views per day is unchanged from the 2015–2019 average of 11 views per day. By contrast, the FA-class head article Chad has averaged a fairly steady 2,323 daily pageviews since 2015.

WP:POG guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal." That is not the case here: I just tagged[1] WP:WikiProject Chad as inactive, because its talk page consists overwhelmingly of announcements from outside the project, and the last actual discussion (i.e where one editor replied to another) was in 2007: WT:WikiProject Chad/Archive 1#Template_needs_to_be_changed.

This portal was created in Feb 2010 by Belovedfreak (talk · contribs), a prolific creator of subsequently-abandoned portals. (They created Portal:Togo, Portal:Burkina Faso, Portal:Gabon, Portal:Mauritius, Portal:Niger, and recreated after deletion Portal:Sudan and Portal:Botswana). Belovedfreak's last edit to this portal was on 8 March 2010, only 25 days after creating it.

Since then, the subpages have been abandoned. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Chad shows 4 "Featured articles" + 2 "featured biogs" (none of which are FA-class, tho some are GA). Between these 6 pages there has been a total of three edits since Belovedfreak moved on, all trivial. The pages are so out-of-date that Portal:Chad/Featured article/4 begins The current civil war in Chad began in December 2005 ... but the linked article Civil war in Chad (2005–present) has been moved to Chadian Civil War (2005–2010), because it ended on January 15, 2010. But for 9½ years, Wikipedia was telling its readers that the war was still current.

There are also five "Did you know" pages, all containing items from before 2010. . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this nine-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section.

Back in July, I had identified this portal as a possible MFD candidate, and added it to my list. When I visited today, I found that it had since been "updated". That was initially encouraging, but on further scrutiny the "update" is very poor.

In a series of ~23 edits across 31 minutes on 5 September,[2] Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs) (aka NA1K):

removed the stale DYK section (good idea)
Created a slideshow consisting of the images from 3 pages (Culture of Chad, History of Chad, Chad)
Removed the "selected biographies" section
listed 24 articles for automatic excerpt in a "Selected articles" section

This is some improvement, but is a long way from bringing the portal anywhere near an acceptable standard.

There remains a long list of problems:

The topic remains too narrow.
The image gallery is redundant. Copying the image gallery of other pages is just a revival of the rapid portal-creation idea promoted by the notoriously disruptive portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH) . It adds no value to the reader, because each page now has a built-in image gallery of much higher quality than the postage-stamp-sized images on a portal.
No explanation has been provided anywhere of how the listed articles have been chosen, or what efforts have been made to select a balance of topics by factors such as chronology and POV, and to present a rounded view of Chad. Given that the entire exercise of selection and formatting took 31 minutes, it would be foolish to AGF that any such scrutiny took place.
The WikiProject remains inactive
In keeping with the drive-by nature of these edits, no notification was made to the WikiProject that its portal had been overhauled. So there's no effort to recruit maintainers.
The portal still has no maintainers. NA1K did not add themself as a maintainer, which is just as well, because that would have no credibility: NA1K had previously added themself as maintainer to no less than 42 portals (Afghanistan, Belarus, Belize, Biochemistry, Coffee, Colorado, Companies, Costa Rica, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Evolutionary biology, Food, Free and open-source software, The Gambia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Housing, Hungary, Islands, Italy, Kuwait, Liquor, Lithuania, Moldova, Money, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Oman, Ontario, Panama, Physics, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia, Supermarkets, Tanks, Vietnam) They subsequently wisely removed themself as "maintainer" of all 42 after this was challenged as implausible.

What we're left with here is that NA1K's "update" is actually just a minor variation of TTH's automation spree: take a random topic in which you have no experience or expertise (or collaborators who possess those attributes), throw together a quick list, point an image-scooper at a few other articles, and move on.

This is a clear fail of all they key tests in WP:POG:

N Broad topic. No. See above..
N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of 11 views per day is trivially low.
N Lots of of maintainers. No. Zero maintenance from 2011 to 2019, then a 31-minute drive-by makeover from a serial driveby editor.
N Associated WikiProject. No. WP:WikiProject Chad is inactive.

This portal is a solution in search of problem. The featured-class head article Chad offers better navigation, better showcasing, and a better image gallery. In short, it does does a much better job of the portal tasks than the portal page does.

We do a great to disservice to our readers by luring them away from Wikipedia's finest quality of article, polished by many editors and monitored by many more, and directing them to a page which consists of a 31-minute paint-job by an enthusiastic stranger to the topic. It's time to end the farce, and just delete it.

Since the problems have persisted for a decade, I oppose re-creation. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:23, 11 September 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:Africa), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:27, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator, BrownHairedGirl. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to abandoned junk that misinforms them and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Chad is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 09:20, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete in concurrence with the analysis of User:BrownHairedGirl.
- There has been further improvement by User:Northamerica1000 since the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. There are now 30 rather than 24 articles. This is in my opinion broad enough coverage, but the portal still fails on low readership, and a second paint job does not amount to systematic maintenance (which is usually lacking for portals including this one).
- Advice to editors assessing portals: "Look under the hood" at the engine (the innards of the portal) as well as at the accessories (the Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:name stuff. In this case the accessories looked like it had 6 articles, but it now has 30. (That isn't critical to the fact that the readership is too low). Verify the number of articles unless either something else is obviously wrong or the number of articles has already been verified by a reliable editor (e.g., BHG). Also verify the pageview metrics unless something else is obviously wrong or the pageview metrics have already been verified.
- Portals are not a useful way to address systemic bias.

Robert McClenon (talk) 00:21, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert, thanks you for pointing me to the latest "updates" by NA1K, which are too comical to merit your generous description of them as an improvement.

As I expected, NA1K has entirely missed the points: that the topic is too narrow, and that a portal needs multiple maintainers and a WikiProject. Instead, NA1K has done their usual trick of last-minute addition of more articles, but has botched even that. Take a look at the additions[3]:

Geography of Chad (C-class ...(but so abysmally referenced that I have added about ten cleaanup tags to it[4]))
Ouaddaï highlands (start-class )
Tibesti Mountains (B-class)
Chadian Air Force (start-class)
Food security in Chad (unassessed)
Chadian wild dog (stub-class)

Note that WP:POG#In_general in says that article should be "above a Start-class". Yet even when the portal is under scrutiny at MFD, only two out of NA1K's six additions meet that basic requirement. After all the years NA1K has been working on portals, and all their involvement in debates about POG, they should be in no doubt that this is risible.

It is so daft that I don't honestly know what to make of it. Is it some sort of attempt to troll MFD? Or further evidence that NA1K has serious WP:CIR issues? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:27, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BrownHairedGirl: To throw something related into the mix, I actually confronted Na1k on his talk page yesterday concerning two other portals on individual African countries which, up to his intervention, lacked maintenance that could easily be considered adequate. He responded with the following comment:

The first step was to update the portals with fresh content, using transclusions, so the most up-to-date content is displayed for the reader. The addition of new entries that were previously nonexistent is a part of this process. Then, outdated content was removed or updated, oftentimes replaced with new information. It's a process that takes time.

A very likely reason for low page views is that readers would likely go to portals such as these, realize that there is not much content there, and then not go back. For whatever reasons at MfD, people have not been considering this possibility. A portal with a decent amount of content is more likely to receive return visitors, in my opinion.

Another matter is the presence or lack thereof of visible links to portals. If visible links are not abundant, then people are unlikely to visit them. Since updating the portals, it is hoped that more page views will subsequently transpire as time goes by.

Of course, if these are nominated for deletion, based upon the previous page views and states that the portals were previously in prior to being significantly updated, then this potential will never have a chance to be realized. I think the rush to deletion that has been occurring at times is overly hasty and WP:EAGER in some cases, particularly in instances where portals have been updated as I have described herein.

My plan is to update portals that I have improved from time-to-time, adding new content periodically and rotating content when this would be functional. It seems that some at MfD feel that portals must be updated every day, for hours a day, or something like that, which is unlikely to occur for any Wikipedia content.

-ToThAc (talk) 19:43, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think that is all broadly not OK. The only valid purpose of a Portal in my opinion is to be, or at least support, comprehensive subtopic navigation via browsing. Browsing means that the reader is discovering topics that they were not looking for. I think readers going to portals quickly turn back because: (1) they do not offer comprehensive browsing opportunity, but instead offer only a small seemingly-random selection; (2) a large amount of the portal takes the reader into Projectspace, and so is not reader-serving, but feels like a bait-and-switch trick. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:38, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with @SmokeyJoe that this is not OK. NA1K has been trotting out for months a variety of excuses for low pageviews, but never produced a single shred of evidence to support any of them. It's always unevidenced assertions, like the "in my opinon" about more content = more readers. (There;s plenty of actual evidence to counter- that, like Portal:Military history of Australia: lots and lots of content, but a median of only 12 views per day since the start of 2019.

Similarly, NA1K claims that the problem is the the presence or lack thereof of visible links to portals. The reality is that NA1K has never either produced any evidence about correlations between links and portal views, or taken any proactive steps to significantly increase the links. So all the "more links" talk amounts is unevidenced assertion that the goal can be achieved by a specified process ... even tho neither NA1K nor anyone else is doing that process.

It's as daft as this dialogue:

"Alice, your car is making horrible noises"

"Yes, but it'll be fine when X is done"

"Alice, has that X worked for anyone else?"

"Dunno."

"So, Alice are you going to do X?"

"No"

"OK, Alice, is someone else gonna do X for you?"

"Not so far as I know".

The response will be somewhere on a spectrum from furrowed eyebrows to the arrival of men in white coats. And the more that Alice repeats the same assertions about X, the closer Alice will get to having that wee chat with the the white coats about her Wonderland. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:04, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Someone wrote: There are now 30 rather than 24 articles. This is in my opinion broad enough coverage.

Absurd.

A portal, like a metaphysical doorway through which you have access to much. 30 articles is a one page list. It is woefully inadequate. I think the top portals should provide navigation to all six million articles. I think there should be 10-100 portals. Probably 10, maybe 100. If 100, these 100 Portals should cover the 6 million articles. 60 000 each? Well no, some areas are bigger than others. Half the articles are biographies, for example. But the answer should be in the thousands, not 30. 30 can be accessed by a list, and it doesn't even have to be sorted to be useful. A portal should be something clever and advanced, and capable of navigating to orders more than 30. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:45, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with @SmokeyJoe about the woeful inadequacy. 30 articles is not even a one-page list; it's a slim 5- or 6-line navbox.

I think that @Robert McClenon, who noted the increase to 30, was probably impressed by the improvement over the flood of portals at MFD with an abysmal tally of less than 20 articles. But it's long past time to set our sights much higher, to insist that portals have to genuinely add value, and provide pathways to a number of articles several orders of magnitude greater than this.

The wider question of how many portals we should have is a wider matter which should be discussed elsewhere. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:41, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The portal guidelines, if they are guidelines, specify a minimum of 20 articles. If they are not guidelines, that is common sense anyway. The changes by NA1k brought it above the minimum, and then a little more above the minimum. The idea that we need more than 20 articles has to be based on common sense rather than the portal guidelines, and common sense has been lacking in portal deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 13:55, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The so called portal guidelines page WP:POG is a fake guideline and a pariah guideline. I properly de-tagged it, but am reverted basically because BHG is committed to its WP:Soft protection. I think she is doing that, because even as hopeless as it is, on examination it makes proponents of the majority microportals look like fools. A minimum of 20 is absurdly small, and yet so many failed even that. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:42, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@SmokeyJoe, my main concern is that changes to a guideline on a contested area should should involve an explicit consensus-forming process. WP:BOLD includes WP:RECKLESS, and bold edits to hot topics are rarely wise. WP:BOLD#Wikipedia_namespace says that "often better to discuss potential changes first". WP:WPEDIT is quite clear about this: "changes that would alter the substance of policy or guidelines should normally be announced on the appropriate talk page first. The change may be implemented if no objection is made to it or if discussion shows that there is consensus for the change. Major changes should also be publicized to the community in general, as should proposals for new policy pages".

Substantively, the state of POG is that it roughly reflects community consensus on the issue of which topics should have portals: very broad, with lots of readers and maintainers, and an involved WikiProject. However, on the nature of what portals should contain, it is way out of date. So it would be far better to open RFC(s) on the unresolved content issues than to deprecate the whole document. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:15, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But:

It is not a guideline. It is a fake guideline. It *never* achieved consensus. It was rejected. Someone surreptitiously retagged it, and that does not make a guideline. No one was watching, and anyone who might be curious would have looked at wikipedia:Portal, which just confuses and does not lead to wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines. And even if one did get to wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines, they just find mind clouding waffle, not guidance, nothing actionable.

It has never represented community consensus.

It fails to even define the purpose of a portal.

It would be good to open an RfC (singular), not the myriad of RfCs that you and Robert created. It would also help to open an RfC with something that at least one persons believes would succeed.

In the meantime, WP:POG is crap, it has produced worthless time wasting portals, misled editors that it does have support, and you are WP:Soft protecting it. But hey, at least something is happening. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:08, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@SmokeyJoe, I think you missed my point about how POG is good in parts. I agree with you about the other parts.

If you want to deprecate it or de-guideline it, go ahead and do that RFC. I'll probably support it. But Last time you suggested an RFC, I drafted something and you got cold feet ... but if you want to pursue this idea, an MFD page is the wrong venue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:21, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

User:SmokeyJoe, User:BrownHairedGirl - Concerning the RFC, I did publish a real RFC to ratify the portal guidelines. It has been more than 30 days, and the bot has de-activated the RFC for closure. I haven't counted the opinions which were all over, but I think that No Consensus is a likely close, which will leave us right where we were, nowhere. That has nothing to do with this MFD, which is ready for closure as Delete. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:55, 19 September 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.