Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Tasmania

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) 05:22, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Tasmania

Portal:Tasmania (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Severely neglected mini-portal on a narrow topic, with low readership, and no WikiProject suuport. It has stale DYKs, 11-year-old "news", wildly outdated content forks, and its pointless attempt to replicate the category tree has been replaced by the navbox which is already on dozens of articles.

Tasmania is an island state of Australia, with a population of only 533,000. It is rare for geographical portals of areas this small to be sustainably viable, i.e. to attract enough readers and editors to avoid rotting. Over the last seven months of portal MFDs, dozens of such portals have been deleted because they are similarly neglected.

The portal page was created in March 2006 as a redirect to Portal:Australia, and in December 2007‎ it was converted to a stand-alone portal by Seb26 (talk · contribs). Over the rest of that month, it was built by Seb26 and Daniel (talk · contribs). Daniel made no contributions to the portal after Dec 2007, and Seb26 made only two after that month (see the portal-space contribs by Daniel and those by Seb26.

Since then, the portal has been little touched, apart from the usual formatting tweaks to the mainpage, some additionals DYKs in 2014 and 2015, and a few drive-by trivial edits to sub-pages.

The result is that Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Tasmania shows:

• Portal:Tasmania/News, with only two items, one from 2008 and one from 2007. No value to readers.
• Portal:Tasmania/Did you know with 8 subpages, but only the first 4 of which have any content. Each is a set of ~4 items:
  • /1: unchanged since 2007
  • /2: new items in 2014
  • /3: 4 new items in 2015
  • /4: 4 new items in 2015

The 2015 additions all appear to be sourced from

WP:TRIVIA

section. No value to readers.

• makework
  for editors, and is no longer used in the portal.
• Portal:Tasmania/Selected article with 13 sub-pages. All are content forks created in 2007. Some of them have had technical edits such as date unlinking, disambiguation or removal of deleted images, but none has had any substantive update to their content. This means that mnay of them are absurdly outdated. Taking just the first 3 articles:
  • /1: says that the Tasmanian devil may soon be listed as endangered. It was actually added to the IUCN's endangered list in 2008.
  • /2: a start-class article on the proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill, which was never built. Its owner went into voluntary administration in 2012, and planning permission has lapsed.
  • /3: is about Hobart, and it still cites the 2006 population figure.

This set of wildly outdated forks actively misleads readers.

There is also a set of images, which have all be unused since 2018, when TTH changed the portal to use {{Transclude files as random slideshow {{PAGENAME}} }}. That means that the portal now just replicates the image set built of the head article Tasmania, with the difference that the portal's tiny image window is vastly inferior to much better image slideshow which is built into every Wikipedia page for logged-out readers.

There are no active maintainers. The last significant change was the now-stake DYKs added in 2015; the rest nearly all date from 2007.

Portal talk:Tasmania has had no discussion ever. The only post ever made there is a single mass-message by User:The Transhumanist (TTH), which got no replies.

There is a WP:WikiProject Tasmania, but it too is uninterested. A search of its talk space for "Portal:Tasmania" gives no hits. No other project is interested either: whatlinkshere for the Wikipedia talk namespace shows no links from any talk pages. And there are no links from user talk pages.

It is almost unread. In Jan–Jun 2019, it averaged only 9 views per day, which is barely above background noise. That is despite 623 links from articles, and 456 links from categories.

Even the portals project is uninterested. Portal talk:Tasmania has the {{WikiProject Portals}} banner, but nobody has ever bothered to assess it for quality or importance.

This should have been deleted years ago. Time to delete it now. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:20, 23 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:Australia), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:35, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per BHG's thorough analysis. I was clearly ahead of the curve many years ago by spotting the downward trend in portal viability. It's blatantly obvious that there is zero interest in supporting and maintaining this portal, and not enough content to keep it going in the first place. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 03:58, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Why not see if someone at the WikiProject wants to maintain it before nominating? It's not the largest project in the world, but they should still have content to feature. SportingFlyer T·C 10:09, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• SF, I didn't seek prior discussion because:

1. The project has shown zero interest in the portal for 13 years
2. The portal is on too narrow a topic, and no amount of project interest will alter that.

So I see no good reason not to go directly to MFD. The project has been automatically notified via WP:WikiProject Tasmania/Article alerts since 08:09 UTC today[2]. If members of the project want to comment of the portal's fate, they can contribute to this discussion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:09, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• SF, they do have content to feature, and it is all laid out in the well structured (with mouseovers), and more regularly edited (and therefore scrutinised) Main Article on Tasmania. Why would an editor spend time maintaining an inferior composite clone of the Main Article + NavBox + WP Project article directory? There are several Portal MfDs where a WP Project maintainer has made the same point (eg Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Sailing). Britishfinance (talk) 12:36, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - Portal:Tasmania had an average of 9 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as contrasted with 2677 for the head article. 13 articles were forked between 2007 and 2008, mostly unchanged but some minor edits through 2018. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:18, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Australian State Portals

Tasmania

• Delete. Portal is technologically redundant to other superior WP options/tools. For content, the Main Article is a better, larger, structured read (with mouseovers), that is actively monitored and edited. For navigation, the Navboxes on the Main Article are also far better, and by being transcluded are also kept more up to date. Finally, for a directory of FA/GA articles, the WikiProject Tasmania has a full non-POV’ed directory. This portal is therefore “rationally abandoned” by editors, WProject Tasmania editors, and readers in favour of better alternatives, and unlikely to recover from that situation. Britishfinance (talk) 17:04, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete doesn't need a portal period.Catfurball (talk) 21:23, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - As discussed. Low readership, no maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:19, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nominator, per the delete votes above, and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the poor condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Portals are not content, like an article is, since they are for navigation instead. It is therefore improper to use rationales meant for keeping articles to argue that this failed navigation device should be kept. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised or done at the last minute just to stave off deletion. 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. The community's consensus not to delete all portals is not a consensus to keep all portals; instead they are to be evaluated individually, as is being done here. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve old and inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 04:42, 29 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.