Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Palatine Forest

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: MfD no longer relevant now that the creator has WP:BOLDly moved the pages to the Project space. I think it best if any editor objects to the content in the new location (unlikely, in my view), they open a new MfD of the project page. I plan to request deletion of the cross-namespace redirect. (non-admin closure) UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:58, 25 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Palatine Forest (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Narrow topic, with a low readership, and poor maintenance.

The topic is the Palatinate Forest, a low-mountain region in southwestern Germany, located in the Palatinate in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

This portal uses the mega-navbox format which its creator and main maintainer Bermicourt has imported from the German-language Wikipedia. I personally think that this is a vastly superior format to the predominant one-at-a-time "selected article" style of navbox, but sadly readers seem no more interested in reading this superior type of portal than the horrible old purge-for-new-selection format.

However, this portal clearly fails the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". It fails on all three counts:

1. N Broad topic. Clear fail, because this is a narrow topic. Category:Palatinate Forest + subcats contains a total of only 975 unique articles, of which only 610 are non-stubs. Using AWB for analysis, I found that 180 of those 610 articles are start-class. That leaves only 430 articles above start-class, which fails the POG requirement that "The portal subject area should have enough interest and articles to sustain a portal, including enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section". None of those 430 articles are GA-class or FA-class.
2. N High readership. Clear fail. The portal's January–June 2015 daily average of only 6 views per day is trivially low. At this level, the background noise of editors checking and maintaining the page forms a significant part of the total readership.
3. N Lots of of maintainers. Fail. The portal's history shows little maintenance. The unmaintained pages include Portal:Palatine Forest/New Articles, Portal:Palatine Forest/Article of the Month and Portal:Palatine Forest/Articles for Improvement, each of which was last updated in 2013.

Unlike some other similarly-built German portals, this one does not have a "Wanted articles" section. Instead, there are redlinks in each section. But much of the rest could be a basis for navboxes, so I would happily support moving the portal to the appropriate WikiProject, which is probably WikiProject Germany.

Bermicourt has indicated elsewhere (e.g. at MFD:Portal:Eifel) that portals such as this are primarily intended to assist editors rather than readers. This conflicts with WP:PORTAL, which says that " Portals are meant primarily for readers". BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:32, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment to User:BrownHairedGirl – The interior of a portal is a black box. Readers don't see whether it is using the old design with forked subpages or the newer superior mega-navbox design. They see a portal. The design improvement makes the portal more accurate and has other advantages in the long run, but the readers don't notice. (They do notice if a portal has incorrect information on a head of government). Robert McClenon (talk) 19:08, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Question for User:Bermicourt – If this is primarily for editors and not for readers, why not move it into project space? Portals are reader-facing. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:08, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Question – Is this a toy portal? Robert McClenon (talk) 19:08, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Views sought. Okay, so as suggested I've moved this portal into project space. I must confess I thought it was one of the single-page portals that just required a simple move, but it wasn't so I hope I've moved all the subpages correctly, but at least it gives us an example of what that could look like. Now it's in project space it shouldn't be visible from mainspace and page views become irrelevant. It's solely a project tool. Views? BTW I'm totally happy to move it back if that is the eventual consensus. Bermicourt (talk) 19:51, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Moving it into wp namespace deals with many of my concerns about portals (e.g. showing poorly-maintained material to readers and wasting the time of editors who have no interest in promoting portals). However, the page currently refers to "portal" etc at least 14 times so needs some work if it's not a portal. It also has inlinks that'd need deleting/amending. There appears to be a lot of unnecessary infrastructure here (e.g. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Germany/Palatine Forest/Article of the Month was created in 2013, but has never been used to propose an article). DexDor ^(talk) 21:29, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for moving it, @Bermicourt. If any or all of the portal will be helpful in project space, then I am quite happy for it to be moved rather than deleted. However, it still has links from article space with the redirect from Portal:Palatine Forest to Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Palatine Forest, and the closing admin should delete that redirect.

Now that it's in portal space, it would be a good idea to follow DexDor's suggestion, and remove the "portal" labelling. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:59, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Move @Bermicourt Thank you for moving this page out of portal space. That is a good compromise, as is deleting any remaining redirects, portal links, etc. I hope you don't take my delete votes for other portals you have made personally. Not trying to be harsh, just calling it as I see it, and with so few views for these portals and their head articles, I can't help but see them as existing for you and not readers. I admire your passion for history and culture, I just don't think this stuff warrants portals. Would you be open to possibly moving the other pages like Portal:Westerwald out of portal space in the same manner? Newshunter12 (talk) 05:46, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Move to project space of this toy portal. Would be a good idea for other toy portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:40, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Support move per above. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 03:46, 23 August 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.