Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Angola (2nd nomination)

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 (without prejudice to a properly formed recreation). MER-C 14:28, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Angola

This is malformed, unnmaintained junk which wastes the time of any reader who visits it.

This page is not worth keeping in any of its revisions. It was created 11 years ago today, and has remained junk throughout that time. It was MFDed in February 2009 as an Incomplete portal, and kept because of the clear consensus of arguments such as those by User:Dr. Blofeld: Don't see any reason why it couldn't be filled out.

However, 10 years and 2 months later we can see the reasons which were not evident in 2009. It can't be filled out because filling it out needs a lot of sustained work by one or more editors, and for a decade no editor has wanted to do that work.

Lack of maintenance is what led this portal to be converted[1] in January 2019 to the new automated format, by The Transhumanist. However, that automated portal built its selected articles list solely from the navbox {{Angola topics}}, which made it simply a bloated WP:REDUNDANTFORK of the navbox. There is a clear community consensus that single-navbox automated portals are useless (see Nomination of MFD:Mass-created portals based on a single navbox, where 1,390 of them were deleted by overwhelming consensus of an exceptionally high turnout).

As a result, earlier today, @Northamerica1000 reverted[2] this portal to the old manual format. I am sure that was done in good faith, but unfortunately little care seems to have been taken about quality of the result. The latest version is also junk:

Neither its selected article nor selected biography sections have a link to the article from which which the snippet is displayed. So this is not a navigational aid; it's a dead-end
The subpages Portal:Angola/Selected article and Portal:Angola/Selected biography each contain only one entry. So you whack that purge button all day long, and you'll only ever get the same page with the same pair of dead-end snippets.

In other words, after 11 years of this portal's existence, there is no version worth keeping. We should not be wasting readers' time by encouraging them to visit this junk.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", but this is an exceptionally degraded version of the head article Angola. Luckily, the portal got only 15 pageviews per day in January and February 2019, but that's still a lot of people's time wasted: it's 876 views of a page of junk.

(Aside: note that these abysmal pageviews are for a portal which is unusually well-advertised. It is linked from 5 navboxes, 6 portals, 292 articles and 551 categories. Those who claim that portals just need more promotion are clearly not checking the data on portals which are promoted).

Yes, I am aware that Angola is a country. WP:POG guides that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Angola is clearly a broad topic, but there is no clear community consensus either way on which broad topics should have portals. The head article is a Level-4 vital article, i.e. it is in the 1,001–10,000 range of priority topics, which seems to me to be a marginal set. As of now there 2,881 portals, of which 1,576 are being discussed at MFD, leaving only 1,305 whose existence is undisputed. So it seems to me to be unlikely that community has the resources to extend portals far (if at all) into VA-4 topics. (For a live count of currently-existing portals, see Category:All portals, live population count=543).

Despite my own scepticism, I do not want to prejudge the outcomes of any RFCs which define more precisely which portals the community does actually want. So I propose that this portal be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:12, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (Portal:Angola)

add your keep/delete/comment here

Delete - Another copy of the empty set, pretending to be a country: ONE article, ONE picture, ONE biography. How this kind of shit can ever pretend to be a navigation tool ? Pldx1 (talk) 13:47, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete BHG makes a good case--S Philbrick (Talk) 15:06, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete without prejudice to re-creation. I'll be interested in building and maintaining country portals, which are obviously solid comprehensive topics, when we're past this manual vs. automated portals phase and have settled on the way to do it. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 17:13, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
No prejudice against re-creation of a more comprehensive portal for this topic. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:39, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Angola is clearly a portal-worthy topic, but even The Transhumanist version is better than the zero Selected article (the one present is just the head topic), one bio, two image version. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:04, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete unlike articles where a stub is better than no coverage of a notable topic, a portal is supposed to feature great content. This is not the case and as Portal:Aruba discussion shows, an unmaintained country portal can be deleted. Also we should look at Portal:Sierra Leone and some other country portals TTH rebooted on the same day Jan 22. Legacypac (talk) 05:34, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
See also WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Myanmar, a discussion of another perma-junk portal restored to a useless manual version by @Northamerica1000, again without marking it as needing attention. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:16, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - When I click on More Biographies or More Articles, it gets stuck. That isn't worth trying to fix in its current state. As stated by nominator, without prejudice. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 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.