Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alabama

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) 02:30, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Alabama

Neglected portal. Fifteen never-updated selected articles. Three created in May 2010, and 12 in May 2009. Seventeen never-updated selected bios. Five were created in May 2010, and twelve were created in May 2009.

Errors

Bobby Eaton retired from wrestling in 2015
Brodie Croyle hasn't played for the Kansas City Chiefs since 2010. He retired from football in 2012.
Charles Barkley did not go through with running for Alabama governor
Captain Munnerlyn has not played from the Carolina Panthers since 2018, and his team was listed incorrectly during his four-year stint with the Vikings.
Richard Scrushy left prison in 2012.

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:00, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Alabama shows, among other things, 15 articles and 18 biographies. Of those, 32 were content-forked in 2009 or 2010 and have been unchanged except for cosmetic edits. Biography 18 was added in 2017, perhaps to bring things up to date, but it states that Jeff Sessions is Attorney General of the US. This illustrates that periodic additions to content-forked subpages do not prevent content rot. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:30, 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
Washington (state)	17	3881	0.44%	After correction for renaming. Originated 2008. 11 articles unchanged since 2008-2012 except for tweaks and renaming; 1 article added 2 Oct 2019.	12		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
Alabama	19	3513	0.54%	Originated 2009 by sporadic editor, last edited July 2019. Of the 33 articles, 32 were content-forked in 2009 or 2010 and have only been tweaked. One was added in 2017, and is obsolete because it states that Jeff Sessions is Attorney General of the US.	33		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) 17:22, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Alabama

Delete as per analysis by User:Mark Schierbecker. Low views, very little maintenance on articles.
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.
Outdated information illustrates the unsoundness of using content-forked subpages. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:22, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete states don't need portals period.Catfurball (talk) 19:10, 2 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) 23:02, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this condition. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. 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 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. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:04, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. A portal consisting of outdated content forks is worse than useless, because it risks actively misleading readers. This one has had no almost zero maintenance of its content for years, which is presumably why in September 2018‎ User:The Transhumanist (TTH) chose to "upgrade" (his term) it to a single-page design.[1] In reality, this was a downgrade, which left the portal as just a bloated clone of the navbox Template:Alabama. just like the navbox-clone portalspam which was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two).

So in April 2019, @UnitedStatesian wisely reverted [2] the portal to a pre-automated version. That restored the portal to its abandoned state, from which it has not been rescued. Since then it has had a series of the usual formatting tweaks, but no update to its neglected and rotted content forks.

AFAICS, there has never been any proactive maintenance of the portal's content, apart from the usual technical tweaks (disambiguation etc). the only discussion ever on Portal talk:Alabama was a July 2018 post and reply about a broken news feed.

There seems to be no chance of any involvement from WP:WikiProject Alabama, which has been tagged as inactive since 2017. In any case, the only mentions of the portal on its talk pages are a link to this MFD, and a 2009 announcement of the portal's creation. For the ten years in between, there is nothing.

So there is no realistic prospect of this portal having a sustained future of adding value for readers. If the portals project had any interest in readers rather than in creating a lab for builders of Rube Goldberg machines like the abominable multiple-content-fork structure of this and most other portals, then abandoned relics like this would have been taken offline years ago. But they haven't, and instead we'll probably find a few portals stalwarts asking the community to continue to take a WP:GODOT stance of hoping against the evidence that magical maintainers will magically appear from nowhere to magically build a viable portal on these ruins. Then years of that is enough; time to just delete. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:58, 3 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.