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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: keep. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:33, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Harz Mountains

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Portal:Harz Mountains (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Too fine grained portal. Portal:Lower Saxony already exists. These were copied from German Wikipedia where readers are more likely to be interested in maintaining portals on unofficial regions of Germany. In English, these are not being well maintained and do not attract readers. Legacypac (talk) 19:38, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. That is purely speculation and you are only using 2 criteria, one of which does not apply here: this portal does not need a lot of maintenance since it is pretty well complete. Secondly your view how attractive it is to readers is subjective and, in any case, only one of several reasons for having a portal.
You should not really be picking off individual portals for deletion (save those that were mass-created by TTH) based on your own WP:POV when you well know that the community voted a while back to 'keep' portals in principle and there are ongoing debates about the standards and criteria to be applied. Please withdraw this MFD until there is consensus on the standard required for portals. Bermicourt (talk) 19:51, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
WP:POG and the broad deletion of third level (and some second level) administrative divisions of countries. Claims that all portals should be kept based on WP:ENDPORTALS or some time to develop criteria (which no one has put to an RFC) are no longer, if ever, relevant. Legacypac (talk) 19:59, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Please don't use an Aunt Sally argument; it undermines your already weak case; I've never claimed all portals should be kept. Please withdraw this back door deletion request which is not even in the right place.Bermicourt (talk) 21:49, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
MFD is the correct forum for portal deletion discussions. Look at the archives linked from the top of the current discussions for March and April to get an idea of the pages being deleted here. Legacypac (talk) 06:24, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for clarifying that. I now see that MFD is effectively also PFD. I've deleted the offending text above.
  • Comment - Maintained, 0 subpages, ---------- created 2009-10-15 21:10:26 by User:Bermicourt, maintained by User:Bermicourt : Portal:Harz Mountains. Pldx1 (talk) 19:19, 14 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, maintained, nice selection of good red links. Also refreshing to see a portal that is not the standard substitution of a boring template. —Kusma (t·c) 10:54, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete this portal. The corresponding article, Harz, is not even a level 5 Vital article, meaning it is not in the top 50,000 most important articles on Wikipedia. There is no evidence whatsoever that the community has formed a consensus that there in any value a portal on any subject this narrow, nor any pageview evidence that readers value this Portal over the corresponding article. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:28, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete - In better shape than most portals. The "nice selection of good red links" shows the possibility of expansion, but almost every portal can be expanded, but also the failure to expand. The following notes apply:
      • If kept, should be available for renomination in 60 days.
      • Portals should so be picked off for deletion discussion, which only results in deletion if they cannot be justified. The community only voted in principle that there were such things as useful portals, without commenting on any one of them. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:48, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. Of course it's important to keep working on every portal to improve it (as it is with all mainspace articles) if it is to be a useful signpost to article topics and a useful tool for WikiProjects to improve and extend coverage of a topic. The reason there are so many blue links on this portal is that I actively used it to create many of the articles. It enabled me to identify the gaps in coverage and to prioritise my work, creating new articles and extending existing ones. That's one of the major benefits of a portal and one that, in the debate raging to and fro elsewhere, seems to get forgotten about. I've created over 5,000 new articles on Wikipedia and have used portals extensively to shape priorities and achieve balanced coverage of a topic. By contrast, the recent mass of auto-created portals doesn't meet that remit at all and I am a strong supporter of deleting them. They are of limited utility and only do a disservice to other, decently created and maintained portals, which are earning their pay. Of course, there's always more to do, but we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Bermicourt (talk) 15:01, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - the "not well maintained" argument is obviously false, atleast for this specific well-organized portal. Also, English Wikipedia strives to be a encyclopedia with a global perspective, so it should absolutely contain topics and pages that may only be of interest for a few English-language readers. I do sympathize with the deletion of broken abandoned portals, or of portals that have little chance to be developed into a comprehensive entry point. But this portal includes 300+ links to related articles (rough estimate), so this is a "broad subject area" as required by WP:POG. It's obviously not the largest topic ever, but blindly deleting such minor well-developed portals just out of principle does a disservice to this project. GermanJoe (talk) 11:15, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete (with the "Articles to be added" section userfied or converted to a wikiproject page if necessary). Portals are supposed to be main pages (i.e. not a place for lists of redlinks) for a broad subject area (which, IMO, should be interpreted as Europe or Germany, but no lower). The lower the topic is the less likely it is that editors will maintain it and any readers will ever use it. It's existence also may encourage other editors to (misguidedly) attempt to create further portals. DexDor (talk) 15:18, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. As you put it yourself, that's simply your WP:POV since no-one's defined or agreed what "broad" means in topic terms. And it is simply untrue that "the lower the topic the less likely editors will maintain it"; I've clearly posted myself as the maintainer of this portal. And you totally fail to mention its efficacy in helping WikiProjects improve and extend coverage. Your final point is beginning to clutch at straws since a) you have already claimed readers are unlikely to view it and b) I'm sure anti-portaleers wouldn't let new portals survive longer than a positron in a crowd of electrons. Bermicourt (talk) 20:13, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't misunderstand their use - I've actively used them for some years now, to very good effect. And portalspace is not really reader-facing (in my view it should be, but that's another debate), that's why the hits are so low. They don't appear in searches and are linked from very few articles. That said, you make a good point about project space; if active portals like this are going to be deleted; they should be put into project space so at least the project editors can use them. Bermicourt (talk) 20:50, 23 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong keep. If we are going to have portals, this is how they should be built.
Most portals use a pointless magazines-style bloated format, displaying only one link at a time in a preview format which is pointless now that mouseover on any of the linked list items shows a preview to un-logged-in readers. They are a waste of time.
However, this portal is an excellent navigational tool, with a well-curated list of links under 7 major headings, further divided under sub-headings. It title says that "The portal gives a brief overview of the region as well as acting as a road map for many of the articles about the Harz Mountains in English Wikipedia", and it does that job very well.
The claim of a narrow scope by nominator and DexDor is astonishing. The page has 338 active links article-space links (of which 234 are unique, non-stub pages), plus 19 redlinks to invite readers to become editors. That's plenty broad enough for me.
If the portal project had spent the last year creating pages like this, it would be winning lots of praise, instead of being of pilloried for facilitating a flood of automated spam and wikilawyering against the cleanup.
Congratulations to @Bermicourt for building and maintaining this excellent page ... a WP:TROUT to the nominator not spotting how radically different this to the automated junk and dead magazines which have culled in other MFDs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:53, 25 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - This is a sterling portal, a great example of how portals should support ease of navigation. I could quickly and easily find a page on any topic relating to Harz Mountains and that is what's important. Gazamp (talk) 17:35, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The topic appears to have sufficiently broad coverage, and this model of portal design warrants further investigation. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:52, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per above. I also don't think this should be renominated within 60 days as Robert McClenon suggested. Consensus is pretty clearly on the side of this portal here. However, if a future portal RfC drafts new criteria and this portal does not meet it, then that's clearly another story. Until then though, it should be kept per consensus. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 06:17, 28 April 2019 (UTC) Edits: 06:18, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: effort has clearly been put into this one. It's an example of what a portal should be, in contrast to the drive-by stuff. SITH (talk) 12:16, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: Good quality portal, well maintained and the concept of "breadth of subject matter" is ineherently completely subjective and inevitably influenced by POV. I have not seen it defined anywhere except WP:POG where there was longstanding guidance that a rule of thumb of 20 articles or greater would be required for a Portal. P:HZ clearly exceeds this requirement comfortably, and even satisfies the oft quoted complaint that Portals are poor navigational aids. And low readership numbers is a complete red herring, and not a particularly convincing deletion rationale anyway. WP:NOBODYREADSIT could equally apply to Portals, rather than to Article notability. If only a SMALL percentage of a low number of readers find Portals useful or interesting, they are a success, at least for those readers. We dont delete articles just because of low readership numbers because, with that rationale, it's likely that more than half of Wikipedia content wouldn't exist. --Cactus.man ✍ 18:38, 30 April 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.


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