Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ghana

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 | [confabulate] || 22:45, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Ghana

Improperly maintained portal that violates WP:POG.

The semi-active WikiProject Ghana only lists thirteen articles in the upper quality tiers (FA, GA, FL, etc).
Improperly maintained by the creator, and the only other legitimate maintainer was indefinitely blocked on New Years' 2013. Among the many African nation portals fervently maintained by NA1k, and just like the other similarly-nominated portals, NA1k's changes are merely aesthetic.
Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 21 for the portal versus 5035 for the parent article, or .4171%. ToThAc (talk) 13:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a paint job by a serial portal one-off updater. The one biography sub-page was last updated in 2010, and it's world renowned subject died in August 2018, which speaks to the sloppiness of NA1K's update. Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Natsubee, who (being very generous) abandoned it in Oct. 2009 and has made one edit to this portal and portal space since. The portal clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had a decade of no steady maintainers and it had a very low 21 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (despite the head article Ghana having 5,038 views per day in the same period).

POG also states portals should be associated with a wikiproject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject Ghana is best described as inactive (the last editor to editor conversation was in Oct. 2016), and the portal's only ever mention on the talk page was an August 2019 post by an outside editor stating the portal was abandoned and asked if anyone was interested in maintaining it, which got no response. The portal isn't mentioned on the main page by name, either. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Ghana is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When the portal was updated with transclusions, I added the entry for Kofi Atta Annan directly to the main portal page (diff), which via transclusion, posts the most up-to-date content relative to the subject's page. In the process, I commented-out the selected biography section (diff). The previously outdated content from the single entry at Portal:Ghana/Selected biography was not included on the page after the portal was improved. Not sure why the user above seems to think it was, but after I finished updating, it was not. This improved the portal, providing WP:READERS with up-to-date information, rather than denigrating it. This is certainly not sloppy; rather, it is precise. I went ahead and updated the subpage as well (diff), despite it not being used in the portal at this time. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:38, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The bio was not a redirect and was still part of the portal, so it should have been updated or removed when you did your update, so as not to mislead readers who looked at the sub-pages. Your "update" was shoddy work, which is why I pointed it out for what it was. Also, the fact that you have had to edit the same brief comment seven times already after posting just adds to the serious WP:CIR concerns that @BrownHairedGirl has raised about you. Newshunter12 (talk) 10:01, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I could have previewed more when commenting, to avoid editing the page multiple times, so I'll keep this in mind. Fact is, though, per the page's revision history, BHG has also engaged in this same multiple editing of their own commentary, yet you only criticise me. A bit hypocritical. If you're unable to understand how transclusions work in portals, perhaps the CIR issues are actually your issue. I would critique some of your work, in a friendly, constructive manner, of course, but I notice that you have never created an article on English Wikipedia. link. If you're going to berate the work of others, at least get your facts straight. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:32, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@North America Nowhere in this pages history has BHG edited a little paragraph of hers seven times, so her ce is not at all akin to yours. I understand perfectly well how transclusions in portals work; it's you that fails to understand that that grossly outdated Bio page was still part of this portal, could still have been read by readers who went to the sub-pages, and should have been taken care of when you did your update, if it had been a competent update. That I haven't created an article on Wikipedia is irrelevant, and I have plenty of other work you can critique by going through my edits. I look forward to your response. Newshunter12 (talk) 18:01, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Delete - The recent work by User:Northamerica1000 is not just a paint job. The content-forked subpage structure has been upgraded to transclusion, which reduces but does not eliminate the need for maintenance, and there is no designated maintainer. The repair by NA1k amounts to putting a new transmission in a car with a failing engine, not purely aesthetic. The portal still has only 21 average daily pageviews. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:51, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. The nominator @ToThAc has misunderstood the effects of @NA1K's edit, which are perhaps more easily understood if they are viewed as one big diff[1]. What NA1K actually did was to bypass the content-forked sub-pages, and instead use {{Transclude random excerpt}} to embed a list of 36 articles.

The edit history obscures this, because two of NA1K's long-documented anti-social editing habits are displayed here: their tendency to take ten or twenty edits to do what other editors would do in a single save, and their failure to use helpful edit summaries (e.g. including in the edit summary a link to the article being added).

Here is a list of the 36 articles, prefixed with the quality assessment applied to them by WikiProject Ghana:

B — Kofi Annan
start — Anglo-Ashanti wars
start — Women in Ghana
start — Ghana Cocoa Board
start — Kotoka International Airport
stub — Dutch Gold Coast
start — Ho, Ghana
B — Ghana national football team
C — Akan people
C — Ghanaian cuisine
GA — Harrison Afful
start — Ghana national cricket team
C — Accra
C — Kumasi
start — Sekondi-Takoradi
C — War of the Golden Stool
start — Wa, Ghana
start — Mining industry of Ghana
start — Ghana Premier League
stub — LGBT rights in Ghana
C — Tema
start — 1948 Accra riots
B — University of Ghana
start — Teshie
start — Ghana Empire
B — Water supply and sanitation in Ghana
start — Languages of Ghana
C — Elmina Castle
C — New Patriotic Party
B — Kwame Nkrumah
B — Ashanti Empire
C — Peter Turkson
start — Cape Coast
start — Lake Bosumtwi
start — Abedi Pele
start — Kakum National Park

Note that in many cases, the assessments are way out-of-date. For example, many of the articles rated start-class are actually at C-class standard. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

Delete. Despite the errors in the nomination, @ToThAc is right about other points.

The list of the portal's current selected articles, which I posted above, illustrates the folly of trying to rebuild the portal. There simply are not not enough high-quality articles available, so NA1K chose a "never mind the quality, feel the width" approach. Yes, many of the articles are better than their current assessment rating indicates, but that failure of assessment simply another way in which how any portal on his topic is hobbled by limitations of the barely active WP:WikiProject Ghana.

Category:WikiProject Ghana articles shows that there are 5500 articles in the project scope, but few of them are high quality, as the table shows:

FA	A	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???	Total
0	0	13	126	547	2,682	4,681	0	230	3,207	5	47	27	0	40	267	239	10	409	12,530

Additionally, the years of neglect of the portal were followed by a one-off update of dubious quality. NA1K initially added themself as a "maintainer", but this was one of no less than 42 portals of which they claimed to be a maintainer: (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.

So we are still left with a portal without a maintainer, and without an active WikiProject which might help recruit some maintainers.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also 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". This fails on at least three of the four counts:

? Borderline no. As the table above shows, there is not enough high-quality content to build a balanced portal of high quality. When the numbers are this tight, it is not possible to build a portal which combines the three needed attributes: A/ number of articles, B/ balance of topics, and C/ quality of articles. At least one of the there attributes has to be sacrificed, and the post-NA1K portal sacrifices quality.
N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 21 views per day is low.
N Lots of maintainers. No. Not even one. In the last ten years, its creator User:Natsubee has made only one edit to the portal, and NA1K has withdrawn their claim to maintain it.
N WikiProject involvement. No. WP:WikiProject Ghana is generously tagged as "semi-active", but "in-active." would probably be more accurate. And as @Newshunter12 helpfully notes, it has never shown any interest in the portal.

This portal is yet another relic of a rush of portalmania in the late 2000s, when editor numbers were at their peak, and were often assumed (wrongly) to be ever-growing. But for the last decade, with fewer editors, there has been no interest in maintaining a portal on this topic, and almost no interest in reading it. Time to just delete it. And since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:38, 17 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) 02:58, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable. WP:POG says the portal must have "enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section". The table above lists 246 articles of C-class and above, which is far more than you need for the featured content section. The GAs and FA alone would provide about half the material. Countries which aren't tiny do constitute broad topics (Ghana has a population of about 30 million, which makes it more populous than, say, Australia). Sure, it hasn't got many page views, but that is a fundamental flaw of the portal system in general and consensus is against getting rid of portals entirely. I don't really understand the logic behind the maintainer arguments, whether the creator has maintained it is irrelevant (if that wasn't the case then even highly active portals could be deleted) and the fact that somebody has been making substantial changes to it recently suggests that it is not abandoned. Hut 8.5 18:12, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Hut 8.5: "there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable" – Yes there is. ToThAc (talk) 19:16, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nope, your link doesn't say that at all. Please read it in full, it allows an article "which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively". A typical B class article will certainly deal with the subject substantially. Later criteria make it even more clear that it's not expecting GA class and above, because it insists that the article shouldn't be marked as a stub and shouldn't have any cleanup tags. No article would ever get anywhere near GA with either. Hut 8.5 21:01, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5 This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a little paint job by a serial one-off updater with a history of shoddy work, and who likes portals in general so they try to throw wrenches into random or anticipated MfD's when they can. WP:POG requires portals have large numbers of readers and maintainers, and this has neither. There is also no community consensus to keep junk portals, nor has their ever been one. You are misstating the outcome of the crude RfC in 2018 that asked about eliminating all portals in one go, which was rejected. Subjective broadness about population means nothing here, only this portal's failing of WP:POG. Newshunter12 (talk) 09:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I was planning on expanding the portal periodically, but since it's nominated for deletion, I won't be doing so, unless it is retained. This work was not some sort of "paint job" or "one-off" work at all. The work I performed significantly improved the portal compared to its former state, and was certainly not "shoddy"; it was precise and proper, and served to provide up-to-date content for Wikipedia's WP:READERS. If users don't like some of the article entries, they can be easily changed, and matters can always be discussed at a portal talk page. Since this portal appears likely to be deleted at this point, this process will unlikely have a chance to come into fruition. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:05, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@NA1K, you added yourself as a maintainer to 42 portals, including this one. When the credibility of that was challenged, you removed yourself as maintainer. Now you state that you were planning on expanding the portal periodically, etc, as if you were the maintainer.

So what's the game here? Are you are the maintainer of those 42 portals, or not? Or do you plan to claim to be the maintainer of each of them only when you find it expedient to do so, while denying it the rest of the time?

You added 36 articles. 18 of them are assessed as start-class, and two as stub-class. You write If users don't like some of the article entries, they can be easily changed ... which is basically saying that you want other editors to follow you around as you do these driveby "updates", and then challenge you on the very very basic issues which a very modest amount of checking would have avoided in the first place. That's very bad conduct, and prolific editors who require a full-time cleanup crew behind them eventually find themselves exhausting the community's patience. If you really insist on doing these driveby makeovers of portals on topics where you have no experience or expertise and where the WikiPrroject is not active ... then for God's sake would you slow down and do some of the very basic checks?

Your long-term never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width approach to portals is a significant factor in why we have so many abandoned junk portals. As you know, both your RFAs were notable for the high number of editors who noted your long track record of bad judgement, and the evience here and in many other recent issues is that your judgement has not improved. Please learn from these warnings: stop being so cavalier, and get outside opinions on your judgement rather than charging away with a forest of trivial edits which don't even have decent edit summaries. For example, in this edit [2] you added Cape Coast and Kakum National Park, but with vanilla edit summary Portal further updated / expanded with new selection(s). It would have been spectacularly easy for you to simply write "add Kakum National Park + Cape Coast", creating links for others to assess. After 8 years as an editor, it's astonishing that you either haven't figured that very basic aspect of working collaboratively, or couldn't be bothered communicating what you are actually doing.

Instead of all this forest of black box edits, try being systematic. If you see a portal which you think you want to "rescue", go to its talk page, make a list of the articles you intend to add, explaining how and why you made the selection ... and the post at POG and at the relevant WikiProjects, asking for comments. That way, the proposals can be examined before you make the change, and others can call a halt if you're planning to just splat in starts and stubs, as you did here. Then you can add the list in one go, rather than creating a whole screenfull of opaque edits on the history page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:28, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A reply, bulletized per the points by BHG above:

I removed myself as a portal maintainer because I wanted to, and particularly per WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, nothing more. There is no "game" here.
The assessments for Ghana-related articles are a mess, and are often inaccurate. For example, see Category:B-Class Ghana articles and note articles listed there such as 1996 in Ghana, 2005 in Ghana and 2010 in Ghana, all of which have exactly one reference each. These are certainly not B-class articles. It would be incompetent to blindly add these articles to the portal simply because they are (incorrectly) rated as B-class, and would not improve the portal.
Africa-related articles and content on English Wikipedia suffer from Wikipedia:Systemic bias, whereby editors do not seem to spend as much time working on these topics compared to other topics. This is part of the reason why there are so few GA and FA articles for Ghana-related articles. Perhaps some sort of drive should occur to encourage more work on Africa-related articles.
The articles I added provide a comprehensive overview of the topic. I specialize in geographic/historical and food/drink topics on Wikipedia. I also specialize in other topics. The articles added to the Ghana portal cover aspects of the country's peoples, geography, history, industries, sports, notable persons, and other aspects. The "never-mind-the-quality" comment above is incorrect, as I assessed these articles relative to their suitability for this portal, for a topic that is negatively affected by systemic bias and whose articles are rated in a highly inaccurate, misleading manner. Again, these entries were assessed before being added to the portal, but not blindly based upon (often incorrect) assessments on talk pages.
The talk page for the portal has received no discussion at all, and consists entirely of notices. BHG's addition of a bunch of hoops to jump through for an unused talk page would be fine for a well-read portal, but this portal has not been maintained in years, and again, there's no discussion on the talk page at all. Collaboration is great and desired, but there has to actually be a potential for collaboration to occur. Additions to the portal are easily discerned by clicking on "edit this page" and noting the article additions that were performed. Adequate edit summaries were also provided, although a bit generic at times, they provide the gist of what had occurred. All of this, again, for a portal that has received little work and low readership.
Regarding RfA, I notice that BHG is essentially a "legacy admin", one who was granted the adminship tools during a period of time when requests for adminship received little actual scrutiny compared to matters today, when adminship was not a "big deal". Yet, BHG feels entitled to talk down to me, like they are somehow superior.
I feel that BHG has developed a bias against those who work on portals, referring to portal editors in a consistently negative manner, calling them names such as "the portalistas" and oftentimes demeaning those that post at the WikiProject portals talk page, like actual collaboration to improve portals is somehow wrong.
I feel that BHG has demonstrated a potential confirmation bias against portal editors, as is demonstrated by the user formerly repeatedly referring to me as a "liar" in MfD discussions and elsewhere. Meanwhile, BHG has apparently ignored that WP:POG has been contested as lacking validity as an actual guideline page, as per recent Village pump discussions. The discussion was recently archived here sans any formal closures.
BHG and others continue to treat POG as gospel, despite all of this. See the hatted commentary I have provided below for more information. That's fine, and others are entitled to their opinion, but it could also be argued that those that ignore this evidence of POG'S lack of validity are lacking competency, in favor of a predisposed opinion instead of the facts of the matter regarding POG.

– The fundamental problem of WP:POG's lede being decided upon by a single user –

At its inception, WP:POG never received actual formal discussion to be enacted as a real English Wikipedia guideline page. Instead, label Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines as an information page using the {{information page}} template. There are many reasons why.

The gist of the lead for the portal was added subjectively and unilaterally by one user in 2006 (diff), and no discussion appears to have actually occurred about it until relatively recently. Guidelines should be decided upon via consensus, not by a unilateral addition of content from one user. Meantime, the page has been treated as an actual guideline, despite the content being based solely upon one person's opinion, which furthermore, was added to the page at its infancy.
Furthermore, the page was shortly thereafter marked as historical (diff), with an edit summary stating, "{{historical}}, not an active proposal per lack of talk page activity; suspect lack of advertisement".
After this, and importantly, the historical template was removed (diff), with an edit summary stating, "removed historical tag; this was not intended as a proposed Wikipedia Guideline, but merely guidelines as in advice for portal creators." (Underline emphasis mine).
Per the diffs, the page was not even intended as a proposed guideline from the start, and no consensus was ever formed for the content therein. The page was intended from the start as an information page. It's actually rather a farce that the page was somehow converted to a guideline page, because there doesn't appear to be any meaningful discussion leading to that change. It's like someone just slapped the Guideline page template page on it and it just simply stuck thereafter, sans any consensus.
Furthermore, the lead of the present WP:POG page is worded as an illogical and bizarre syllogism. Some users have been stating that if a portal does not receive what they deem to be adequate page views or maintenance, then the topic itself is somehow not broad enough. Of course, this standard could not be used anywhere else on Wikipedia, because people would reject this as absurd. For example, the Physics article does not receive a great deal of page maintenance, yet the topic itself is obviously broad in scope, both in terms of the topic itself and in terms of the amount of related content available on English Wikipedia. The manner in which this syllogism is worded on the page is subjective and inferior, and has been misused to define topical scope as based upon page views and page maintainers, rather than upon the actual scope of a given topic.

Don't take all of this wrong, and I will keep the constructive criticism here in mind, and I wish everyone here well. It is my hope that we can all get along, learn from one-another, and function in a collegial, positive manner. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Sigh, NA1K, I called you a liar because you were repeatedly telling lies. I am glad that you desisted from doing so, and I desisted from using the p-word.

If you want us to learn from one another, you need to demonstrate some ability to learn, for example not making dozens of edits when one would do. Problems I have noted are real, and repeatedly documented by others, years ago, but even on those very very simple things, you have not learnt (that slow learning was noted at in your RFAs). Your comment Additions to the portal are easily discerned by clicking on "edit this page" and noting the article additions that were performed is utterly extraordinary: the whole purposes of edit summaries is so that other editors don't have to view diffs or view up the page or the edit window to get a good picture of what was done. How hard is it for you paste the title of the page added into an edit summary? It takes me literally about five seconds to type the ten characters in "<tab><end>add [[<ctrl-V>]]"

As to function in a collegial, positive manner, heaven help us. I set out above two simple suggestions for how you could work on portals in a collegial, positive manner, and you just dismissed them both. Make up your mind: do you want to be collegial, or not?

It is astonishing that after all this time, you still make spurious comparisons between the standards applied to articles and to portals. They have very different purposes, and you seem oblivious to the fact that most of the portals which existed even pre-portalspam were abandoned junk, which is why most of them have been deleted.

As to portal guidelines, this is the wrong place to complain about them. But it's very notable that none of the portal enthusiasts objected at all to POG for years ... yet that all of a sudden, when its provisions actually started to be used to apply some sort of quality thresholds after the portals project never even bothered systematic assessment of portals, NA1K and a few others suddenly decided that the guidelines they were happy with all that time are actually rubbish, and that they were never valid in the first place.

I have suggested many times before that those who want changes to POG or to deprecate it should open an RFC, but they don't. In the meantime, however bad the wording, it's very clear that POG wants portals on broad topics with lots of readers and lots of maintainers and active WikiProjects .. and that many hundreds of MFDs have upheld that view.

If you want to follow SmokeyJoe's path and seek to deprecate POG as a guideline, then go ahead and open that RFC. If it passes, then we can just use WP:COMMONSENSE to delete the almost-unread abandoned junk portals with no active Wikiproject, and skip all the wikilawyering about POG's bad wording.

But in the meantime, it is fundamentally wrong that this portal was substantively rebuilt by one editor with no previous experience or involvement in the topic area, who

made their own undocumented decisions to ignore WikiProject assessments
rejects requests to explain how they chose the topics
left the portal with no visible list of the articles added other by editing the source code: there's no list on the talk page, no list on the face of the portal, not even links in edit summaries
cluttered the page history with dozens of edits which could easily have been combined
left no notice on either the portal talk page or the WikiProject talk page of what they had done

This is the complete opposite of collaboration. Instead of the transparency on which collaboration is built, it's maximum opacity. And the repeated failure of a few portals editors to figure out very basic stuff like this is why they get replies which they feel want to being talked down to.

Meanwhile, this remains a portal built from articles which are far from high quality, and whose WikiProject is at best semi-active. Which is part of the reason why I still recommend its deletion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:38, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5: POG is sloppily written in this area, with some fuzzy and even contradictory text. But WP:POG#Article_selection says "of high quality, either a featured article, a good article or one which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively" ... which clearly deprecates NA1K's use of set which is 50% start-class, and where two of the remaining 18 are assessed as stubs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:30, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
WP:ATD: we don't delete pages because of problems which can be resolved through editing. There are exceptions but they are generally severe problems such as BLP violations. That's policy and it applies here just as in article space. If start-class articles aren't suitable for inclusion in the portal then they can be replaced with higher class articles. It's not like this isn't possible, there are 11 GAs and 1 FA which haven't been used yet.

I have to say that I think this comment is appalling. Northamerica1000 made a good faith effort to improve the portal, and is now being rewarded with character assassination, personal attacks and other insults. I'm not surprised s/he doesn't want to make further changes to the portal and that these MfDs aren't getting broader participation. If you really can't have a discussion about a portal without making personal remarks about people on the other side then perhaps you shouldn't be taking part in the discussion. It's certainly putting me off. Hut 8.5 17:58, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5:, editing requires both good faith and competence. It's hard to tell what is lacking in NA1K's case, but some long-standing problems recurred here, and NA1K continues to resist improvement. I stand by my comments. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:24, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

PS Hut, you are right that there are 11 GAs and 1 FAs which are unused in the portal, rejected in favour of stubs and starts. Why? What's that about? NA1k has explained none of that.

More broadly, it seems to me that you you miss the whole point of portals. They are not articles, which we keep unless they have BLP/etc problems, because they are content. Portals are not content.

Per WP:PORTAL, portals exist as an enhanced main page for the topic. If they aren't enhancing, we shouldn't be luring readers away from the head article ... and the theoretical possibility that they might be improved has been mostly unfulfilled for a decade. So readers have been lured for years to portals which serve small sets of ancient content forks, stale new and ancient fake DYKs ... when there is a head article that does the job better. If those portals were in article space, we'd simply redirect them to the head article.

Now NA1K is running around a vast range of topics in which they have no expertise or experience, trying to do an ARS-style "rescue" with non-transparent, unexplained, seemingly perverse selections with zero engagement with topic experts. In this case they skipped past 92% of the FAs/GAs to choose stubs and starts. What's going on? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:42, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Go and read WP:ATD again. If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page. Page, not article. It applies to files, templates, redirects and anything else. Arguing that portals are not articles is meaningless, because ATD does not apply only to articles. ATD is a policy and you have to abide by it. Don't like that? Start an RfC to get rid of it or amend it so it doesn't cover portals. The rest of your comment is just tipping a load of other insults over Northamerica1000, which I'm not going to dignify with a response. Hut 8.5 20:37, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5 I disagree that WP:ATD applies to portals, but even if it did, in order for there to be an alternative to deletion there would need to be maintainers for this portal, which there are none. NA1K withdrew as a maintainer, for whatever that was ever worth, so this portal is still abandoned. For a decade, this portal has not had maintainers, so why should we wait another ten years? Do you think that maintainers and readers are going to just suddenly appear at this portal like mana from Heaven? It fails WP:POG today and should be deleted. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:30, 20 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ATD does apply to portals. Portals are blatantly pages and the policy applies to decisions to delete all pages. A local consensus can't decide that it doesn't apply here because policies represent the highest level of consensus. I find it very strange that you're bemoaning the lack of people making changes to this portal when literally within hours a significant improvement was made. If it really keeps you happy then if this portal is kept I volunteer to replace the start- and stub-class selected articles with others. I'm sure it'll take less time than has been spent arguing about it. Hut 8.5 06:48, 20 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5 editing by one driveby editor cannot resolve the core problems with this portal: narrow topic, low readership, lack of multiple maintainers, lack of WikiProject involvement. Those have all been set out above, but you seem to have let your evident anger cloud your judgement.

It's a pity that you simply dismiss my observations on the very poor quality of NA1K's work. All of them stand up to scrutiny, and while they sure are uncomfortable reading, they need to be stated here because they are both true and highly relevant to the fate of this portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:03, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment on content, not the contributor. As an admin you should know that and attacking people or their motivations is not a valid argument. The goalposts seem to keep shifting: now that the portal has received some maintenance, the problem isn't that the portal is being maintained, and it's become that it doesn't have multiple maintainers and that there is no involvement from a Wikiproject. There is no requirement for either. Hut 8.5 06:46, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5: Sorry, but I think you're still misinterpreting BrownHairedGirl's points, period. She has only called out NA1k's edits to portals that evidently don't address their purpose (and I'm especially concerned that you accused her of ad hominem without basis or proof), and I don't consider that "commenting on contributors" since it's not necessarily attacking someone without basis or reason. ToThAc (talk) 13:31, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5: POG does require both multiple maintainers and a WikiProject. Read POG.

The goalposts are not shifting. They have been in POG all along.

And no, there was no personal attack. Read WP:NPA#What_is_considered_to_be_a_personal_attack?, and stop trying to smear me. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:04, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:POG does require a Wikiproject in the sense that portals have to be associated with a Wikiproject. That doesn't mean that the Wikiproject has to maintain the portal, which is what you seem to be saying. The portal is associated with a wikiproject. Hut 8.5 17:57, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5: Sorry, but I'm not seeing anything at all that says maintainers of a WikiProject are required to maintain its corresponding portal or vice versa. They're two different types of maintenance that have little, if anything at all, to do with each other. ToThAc (talk) 23:22, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's exactly my point. There's a claim above that the portal should be deleted because the portal has no involvement from a Wikiproject. I'm disagreeing with that. Hut 8.5 06:40, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If that's your only argument for strongly keeping this kind of portal, then I don't see why this discussion particularly needs to continue. All other points made for deleting this portal are valid and within policy, uneasy as you might find it, and any recreation of any deleted portal that takes into account the failures of many portals, may be made at DRV. ToThAc (talk) 15:27, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's not how it works. If there is no good argument for deleting something then it is kept. If you want something to be deleted then the onus is on you to show that it should be deleted, not anyone else to prove that it should be kept. And I don't agree that all other arguments made for deleting it are valid, or at least that they have a basis in something other than someone's personal opinion. To recap, we've had:

An assertion that the portal hasn't been maintained. It has had substantial changes recently so this is no longer a valid concern, if it ever was.
An assertion that portal topics need multiple maintainers and/or Wikiproject involvement. I don't see any basis for this in WP:POG or anywhere else, and there isn't exactly much work involved in maintaining a portal.
An assertion that portal topics must have substantial numbers of articles of GA-class and above, which has no basis in WP:POG or anywhere else. Portals should have plenty of articles which cover the subject in detail, don't have maintenance tags, etc, but that's not the same thing at all.
Claims that we shouldn't have portals which get low page views. WP:POG doesn't support this (at least not explicitly) and a recent proposal to delete a load of portals based purely on page views went down in flames, so it's fair to say this argument doesn't have wider support.
Complaints that the selected articles include start- and stub-class articles. This isn't a valid reason for deletion because it's an easily fixable problem and I believe it's been addressed now anyway.

Hut 8.5 17:51, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – The following Good-class articles from Category:GA-Class Ghana articles have been added/placed in a new Good articles section in the portal. The Featured-class article Nafaanra has also been added to the portal. It's all probably moot now anyway, since the portal is likely to be deleted anyway. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:08, 20 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – More articles rated as B-class have been added to the portal (diff). More expansion could occur, of course, but it appears that the portal will be deleted. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:06, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, concur with Hut8.5. Countries are clearly a broad topic, and that a potential maintainer has been bullied into not speaking up for it is just wrong. —Kusma (t·c) 16:15, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Kusma: I'm afraid your argument basically boils down to WP:IWORKEDSOHARD; if NA1k wants to work on their portal in their sandbox while making changes so that it takes into account the failures of many other portals, the only thing potentially stopping them is the outcome of the eventual relevant DRV. Also, due to ongoing systemic bias, it's currently uncertain how broad countries are of a topic, so I think saying that countries are "broad" topics for portals is fallible thanks to said systemic bias. ToThAc (talk) 17:19, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Feel free to ignore my point per WP:ALPHABETSOUP. I am also puzzled how deleting portals about African countries help fight systemic bias. —Kusma (t·c) 07:48, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
That's why I brought up deletion review. ToThAc (talk) 15:27, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete and oppose re-creation per analyses. I have read the entire discussion, and my take is this: Portals do not have the same standards for them as articles - they are not content. Whether a topic is "broad" is demonstrated by the fact that people view and maintain the portal, not automatic because it's a nation-state with millions of people. Some maintenance now doesn't negate the fact that readership is miniscule compared to the topic's article, and that when it was not being scrutinized at MfD, it had no one caring for it. There is no basis for thinking it will be any different years from now. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:15, 24 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.

Portal:Ghana

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