Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Korea

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. This was a long and winding discussion over a very long period of time (why wasn't this closed earlier?). There was no clear numeric consensus in the votes. However, it seemed to me that there are a few arguments for deletion that weren't adequately refuted. Most convincing was the argument that portals should not be redundant to other portals per WP:POG, and it seems that this portal is necessarily redundant to the portals for North Korea and South Korea. Additionally, this portal was clearly not maintained at all for years at a time, which is obviously problematic (but may not always be a sufficient reason to delete a portal, in the absence of other reasons). ‑Scottywong| talk _ 07:20, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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

Sandwiched between Portal:Asia and Portal:South Korea and Portal:North Korea this portal lacks scope real estate to occupy. It's kind of like the DMZ. I propose this be deleted and then recreated as a two page DAB to the two country portals. If the Koreas ever get back together we can revisit this. Legacypac (talk) 19:08, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – Mees WP:POG per topical scope (a broad topic, e.g. see categories below) and per high quality content available on Wikipedia about the topic (e.g., Featured and Good articles, etc., see High quality content below). Another idea is to Merge content from this portal to the South Korea and North portals, respectively. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:33, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

– North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:33, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Convert to disambiguation per nomination; this portal is contrary to WP:POG, which says portals should not be redundant to another Portal. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:41, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Kill this shit: all Koreas, past and present, deserve better. Page views are low [wmflabs], this is the only good thing here.

• The Portal:South Korea is a shameful copy of the empty set: TWO pictures, TWO articles, THREE bibliographies, all from 2015. Ban Ki-moon + a film director + a speed skater, this is South Korea, as seen from this portal.

• The Portal:North Korea displays the following 12 snippets:

1. The Korean War
2. The Chaplain–Medic massacre, 1950, Tunam, South Korea
3. The Hill 303 massacre, 1950, near Taegu, South Korea
4. The Battle of Nam River, 1950, part of the Battle of Pusan Perimeter
5. The Battle of Osan, 1950, south of the South Korean capital Seoul
6. The Battle of Taejon, 1950, (Taejon is 50 minutes south of Seoul by KTX)
7. The 766th Independent Infantry Regiment, NKPA, disbanded 1950
8. The Art of the Cinema, 1973, written by Kim Jong-il.
9. The 6th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), 1980
10. The 2009 North Korean nuclear test
11. The Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang), 2011, scheduled to open partially in 2013
12. 'The Interview', a 2014 American political satire targeting Kim Jong-un

Korean war occurred 1950-1953. All of the Korean War battles had taken place south of the DMZ: don't this seems strange ? The infamous scheduled to open partially in 2013. shows how obsolete are those snippets. Aren't there any noteworthy topics/events that occurred post 2009 ?

The same goes for the six biographies:

1. Kim Il-sung (1912 – 1994)
2. Kim Jong-il (1941 – 2011)
3. Kim Jong-un (born 1983)
4. Jo Ki-chon (1913 – 1951) was a Russian-born North Korean poet.
5. Han Sorya (1900 – 1970) head of the Korean Writers' Union, purged 1962
6. Kim Pyong-il (born 1954), surviving son of Kim Il-sung,

Aren't there any other people ? For example, Kim Jong-nam (1971 – 2017) is missing. Too recent maybe ?

• The Portal:Korea displays the following 11 snippets:

1. The Korean War
2. The Battle of Osan, 1950
3. The Battle of Taejon, 1950
4. The 766th Independent Infantry Regiment
5. The Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang), 2011, scheduled to open partially in 2013
6. The 2009 North Korean nuclear test
7. 'Inchon', war film about the 1950 Battle of Inchon, 1981
8. Rhee Taekwon-Do is a martial art school in Australia and New Zealand who has no relation to the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF).
9. Asia League Ice Hockey, headquartered in Japan.
10. Typhoon Shanshan, which mainly affected Japan, 2006
11. Iris South Korean espionage television drama series, 2009
12. Gyeongju city

Remarks, anyone ?

Then, we have the following biographical snippets:

1. Choe Bu (1454–1504)
2. Kim Ki-young (1922 – 1998), SK film director
3. Seung Sahn (1927—2004), Korean Jogye Seon.
4. Seung-Hui Cho (1984–2007), the mass killer at Virginia Tech massacre (listed 2012-2016)
5. Ban Ki-moon (born June 13, 1944)
6. Tessa Ludwick (born 1988), Korean American actress from Apollo Beach, Florida.
7. Mo Tae-bum (born 15 February 1989), SK speed skater.

Surely the 7 most representative people of Korea among the last 40 centuries !

The shameful state of all of these three portals reflects a simple thing: nobody cares. WP:WikiProject Korea is as mythical as the haetae of the old, while the histories of the various subpages confirm the obsolescence. The guidelines are saying: the portal must be maintained and serve a useful purpose at WP:POG#In_general and Some portals update the selected articles and pictures once a month. Others update them weekly, which is preferred at WP:POG#How_often_to_update?. This is not the case here. The already existing navboxes are providing navigation tools of a largely better quality.

As a conclusion: delete all this shit. All Koreas, and our readers as well, deserve better. Pldx1 (talk) 11:25, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Pldx1: I maintain Portal:North Korea (and sometimes poke around with the other two Korea portals as well). Let me explain some of the design choices of the former. Why are most of the "Selected articles" about the Korean War? Because most of the Featured or good articles on North Korea are about the conflict (undoubtedly because of the highly active Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history and the general tendency to gravitate efforts toward US-centric topics). Regardless of where the battles took place, North Korea was always a combatant, of course. Unlike the recent "fully automated" portals, this one was never automated and it follows the prior de facto convention: "Selected articles" are not random articles from a category or navbox. They are actual handpicked quality content. That's because WP:PORTALs are to topics what the Main Page is to the whole project, and you don't see random crap linked from the Main Page, either. There aren't any FA class biographies so these are the three leaders + anything GA (Kim Pyong-il was there already). The article on Kim Jong-nam for instance is a lowly C, and, let me re-iterate: "Selected articles" are supposed to be quality content, not necessarily recent. There is an "In the news section" for that, and it's as up-to-date as the corresponding Wikinews page (that is to say, not very). I've updated the Ryugyong Hotel entry; like I said, this portal is not automated, so this is the obvious downside. In addition, I've added a few new GAs.

There is a lot of triggerhappiness in both camps with the current situation on portals. My approach has mostly been to watch and learn. While there are obvious shortcomings with the old manual portals, the new fully automated ones have usually been even bigger disasters. I'm waiting for some sort of compromise to happen (perhaps in vain) rather than ruining portals and wasting time by taking extreme measures either way. Once we've settled on the method of building and maintaining portals, it's will be a more fruitful task. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:49, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - Has anyone noticed that the portal says that Ban Ki-moon is the current Secretary-General of the United Nations? That is an old version of a page. Something is wrong here, illustrating both lack of maintenance and something technically wrong that shows frozen snapshots of pages. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:41, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Without prejudice to nominations for the two nation-states or any other portal, but that snapshot of a past page is weird enough to warrant a silver bullet. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:41, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Procedural comment. Dear User:Northamerica1000. Surely, I should have opened a MfD for the Portal:North Korea and Portal:South Korea. Do you think it would be fair to add them here now, or that another procedure should be opened ? Pldx1 (talk) 16:32, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The way Korea topics are organized is that there is only one WikiProject, WikiProject Korea and taskgroups for both countries. This is super convenient because literally everything before 1945, for millennia, is shared history that we don't want to duplicate in two projects. The same goes for many, many aspects of contemporary Korean culture that is shared. Portal:Korea is a great catch-all for such content. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:55, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - When saying: The way Korea topics are organized is that there is only one WikiProject there is a right part: only one (shared history, etc.). Everything else is misleading. Top and foremost this is, which tends to suggest that the WikiProject Korea is alive, while organized tries to mask the cruel reality: only living bodies are organized for real. Using the so called Great Articles as basis is one of the reasons of the resulting disaster.

44 about Korean War

14 about mostly foreign topics

21 about K-pop and dramas

09 about North Korera

13 about South Korea

02 about (marginal) pre-1900 people.

Navigation tools pretending to be portals about Korea and that have no links to Seoul or Busan nor Pyongyang or Kaesong nor to any notable people of the pre-1900 period are to be thrown out, with bathwater and shame. Pldx1 (talk) 18:13, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Procedural comment - Dear all User:Pldx1, User:Northamerica1000, User:Finnusertop, User:UnitedStatesian, User:Legacypac, User:Robert McClenon. I have nominated today Portal:North Korea and Portal:South Korea for deletion. Since the three deletions are related, it would make sense to relist this one so that all three nominations are listed in sequence and perhaps closed one by one but in sequence and by the same admin. Being largely involved, I hesitate to proceed by myself. What do you think about such a relisting ? Cheers. Pldx1 (talk) 16:23, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - My own answer is No. Let this discussion be closed unless a decision is made to relist it. The closer can look at the Portal:North Korea and Portal:South Korea portal discussions without the need to keep this one open. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:31, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Agree with closing The discussions are separate; the two Koreas are countries, Korea is not. UnitedStatesian (talk) 18:48, 27 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• 15 days later - Supposed to be a navigation tool, this portal continues to have no article about Seoul, Busan, Pyongyang, Kaesong, nor any of the people selected for South Korean notes, while the Ryugyong Hotel is scheduled to open partially in July or August 2013 as ever (see Portal:Korea/Selected article/9), and Ban Ki-moon is the current Secretary-General of the United Nations as he ever was (see Portal:Korea/Selected biography/1). Even during this deletion process, the keep !voters cannot be arsed to cure their pet portal from signaled failures. Therefore, the only long-term and reasonable cure is to delete this mess. Without prejudice to a restart from scratch, by people decided to provide a decent portal and to spend the required time. Pldx1 (talk) 13:18, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• It's a bit premature to make requests for improvements while it is nominated for deletion. Common sense really. It would be counterproductive to spend time improving a portal that may subsequently be deleted, watching one's work vanish. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:36, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I disagree: my experience at AfD is that there is nothing like a nomination to bring forth a burst of improvement activity: rewrites, sourcing, adding images, the works. To me, it's more likely here that any prospective improvers recognize the redundancy with the 2 country portals will be fatal to this one, as it should be. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:17, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Don't talk so loud about Ban Ki-moon. There was no requests for improvement. Because I haven't any hope for any improvement. It was only the simple observation that, during this MfD, the keep !voters were not even trying to give the impression they have any intent to do any maintenance to this disaster. Why would they work harder if this disaster was kept ? This is only another case of the well-known pattern: without any crowd, don't hope for any crowd-sourcing to occur. Pldx1 (talk) 22:52, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• One more week later - What were you expecting ? Pldx1 (talk) 16:14, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• One more week later - What were you expecting ? Pldx1 (talk) 08:13, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep North and South Korea have only existed since 1948, before that the countries weren't divided, so any aspect of their history, culture etc which is from before 1948 will not come under North or South Korea. There's plenty of scope there. It isn't an automated portal and the content looks reasonable. Hut 8.5 06:50, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Dear User:Hut 8.5. You are saying: the content looks reasonable. Have you checked Portal:Korea/Selected article/9 that, even now, asserts: the Ryugyong Hotel is scheduled to open partially in July or August 2013 ? Have you checked all this shameful set of expired snippets? The WP:WikiProject Korea is as dead as any other deceased WikiProject, and nobody has any intent to maintain the corresponding deceased portal. By the way, Choe Bu (1454–1504), is the only biography here related to the before 1948 area. Doesn't this seem strange? A portal is supposed to be a navigation tool, i.e. is supposed to be designed according to "there is plenty of scope here", and not only pay a lip service to there is plenty of scope there. Stop mocking the readers with this fake portal ! Pldx1 (talk) 08:49, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I updated Portal:Korea/Selected article/9 to reflect the current state of the Ryugyong Hotel. This is typically the thing to do, rather than leaving outdated information in place as a pointer to qualify deletion. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 20:50, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• (edit conflict)I'm not "mocking" anything and I've been happy to get rid of plenty of rubbish portals in the last few months, including nominating many for deletion myself. There are two basic questions here: is the topic of Korea a viable one for a portal, and is the current portal content good enough to avoid WP:TNT? The answer to the first question is pretty clearly Yes, Korea has been home to advanced civilisations for thousands of years and has produced easily enough material for a portal. There are plenty of other pre-1948 articles which could be listed, just looking through the GAs and FAs I can see Hanpu and Juldarigi. And that's assuming that all post-1948 content is out of scope, which I don't necessarily agree with. That one selected article was out of date means nothing, and you could just as easily have fixed it (as someone else has) instead of complaining about it here. Hut 8.5 20:57, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• The snippets here are so outdated (fixing one doesn't fix the others) because nobody has any intent to maintain this so-called portal. Pretending that Hanpu + Juldarigi, when added to Tessa Ludwick + Choe Bu will provide a navigation tool inside the 40 centuries of Korean civilization and history is quite ridiculous. Here, the key problem is the pretense to describe Korea with the stock of the so-called Great Articles... when everybody knows how decentered they are from the core of the topic! Nothing about Seoul or Pyongyang! Nampo, Busan, Kaesong, unknwon cities ! Nothing about poets, painters, generals, rulers, temples, forteresses, cuisine, rivers or mountains. Nothing about anything. Are you that proud of this non-portal? In any case, readers already know, as can be inferred from the page views. Pldx1 (talk) 22:11, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Actually, regarding page views, the portal has received 2,600 views between 4/20/2019 and 5/20/2019. This is actually rather substantial, and one should keep in mind that main pages almost always receive more page views compared to portals. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:20, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Dear User:Northamerica1000. I suppose that you already know that you are joking. (1) Saying that ${\displaystyle 2600/30\approx 87}$ views par day is rather substantial for a portal appears as a sneaky comment against the whole Portal space. (2) This marvelous score is only the result of the present MfD, see [wmflabs]. Pldx1 (talk) 10:24, 23 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep and Merge the other 2 Korea Portals into this one – This topic is sufficiently broad, and more than notable enough to warrant having its own portal. Since the differences between North and South Korea (which were a single country before World War II) are only political, and since Wikipedia has a single WikiProject covering all activities related to Korea, I think that we should merge all 3 portals together and put everything in one place. The new portal can definitely be updated/maintained with greater ease afterward. LightandDark2000 🌀 (talk) 07:29, 25 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd be happy with this. Note that Pldx1 nominated the North Korea portal for deletion complaining in part that it covered pre-partition topics and topics which affected both parts (such as the Korean War), a merge would address that complaint. Hut 8.5 09:51, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep With a rationale such as "Kill this shit: all Koreas, past and present, deserve better." it is clear that the nominator is acting in bad faith. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:17, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The following spreadsheet shows the average daily pageviews for selected past and present countries, for the period of 1 January 2019 through 28 February 2019. Each of the entries either is a country or has been a country. This is not a complete list of countries. If your country isn't listed, then its portal hasn't been nominated, and I haven't provided it for comparison.

As can be seen, no country portal ever is viewed as often as 1.5% of the frequency of viewing the article. It is commonly stated by portal advocates and others that a country is a "broad subject area" and warrants a portal. Philosophers make a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, between knowledge that is available in advance and knowledge that must be based on observation. It is possible to decide a priori that particular types of subject areas, such as countries, are broad subject areas. However, that is an incomplete quotation of the portal guidelines, and, because of its incompleteness, is misleading. The portal guidelines say that "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." It is not possible to decide a priori that a subject area will attract readers and portal maintainers. That must be observed, and assessed a posteriori. What has been seen a posteriori is that a portal often does not get even 0.3% as many views as the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert McClenon (talk • contribs) 00:19, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, most portals don't get very many views, but that's an argument against portals in general, not this portal. If you want to get rid of portals in general then you should open a discussion about getting rid of portals in general, not try to get rid of them one by one by arguing that portals aren't very useful. Since a recent discussion about getting rid of portals in general decided not to we're pretty much stuck with them for now. Hut 8.5 09:51, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

add your keep/delete/comments below this line

• Keep Korea is a wide subject and it's methodological nationalism to delete this in favour of two seperate portals. Gumlau (talk) 14:55, 15 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since it has already been decided to Keep the two portals on the two nations of modern Korea, the combined portal should be deleted, or disambiguated as recommended by User:Legacypac. An even better idea would be that of User:LightandDark2000 to merge Portal:South Korea and Portal:North Korea into Portal:Korea.Robert McClenon (talk) 00:20, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - Who would merge (etc.) ? Anyone knows what would be required to have a portal, i.e. an efficient navigation tool into Korean topics. This requirement is a staff of volunteers decided to do the required work by themselves. But there is no such a staff. We only have Keep and pray for better days, that can be translated into Keep and let it rot more and more. While waiting for a maintainer Who Would Come From The Stars, it would simply be more honest to stop luring the readers: this abandoned wreck doesn't navigate. Pldx1 (talk) 14:17, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Disambiguate and Delete subpages. Per Robert McClenon's sound analysis above. Merging is a labor intensive effort that would be wasted here if you ask me. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 02:25, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• A merge makes the most sense to me. The two Koreas have a shared history prior to 1948 so a single portal eliminates any overlap, and if maintenance is an issue then surely it would require more work to maintain two portals. IIRC, this portal predates the other two anyway. PC78 (talk) 20:37, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose disambiguation. I don't want to see pointless spamming of Portal:North Korea and Portal:South Korea to pre-division history articles. Also oppose merge per the above (no one has volunteered to actually do the work) and the fact that we just literally kept the two because their scope and condition was considered okay. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 12:02, 25 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Regardless of any potential there might be to create a portal on this topic, the reality is that this one is abandoned. Its 12 selected articles and 7 selected biogs are content forks which have barely changed since their creation in 2012. Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Korea and its navbox Template:Korea topics. Our readers are ill-served by this mini-farm of outdated content forks.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Korea is a country with a long history, so a theoretical argument could be made that it is a broad topic ... but we don't need to rely on theory because we have empirical evidence that in practice this portal does not pass that test: it has not attracted maintainers, and it has not attracted readers. In Jan–Feb 2019, the portal got only 35 pageviews per day, compared with 2,741 daily views for the head article [[Korea]. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:02, 27 June 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.