Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Sailing

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. A clear consensus for deletion has transpired herein. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:50, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Sailing

Neglected portal. Seven never-updated selected articles and seven selected bios created in April 2012.

Errors

Paul Elvstrøm died in December 2016
Ben Ainslie metaled gold in 2012 Mark Schierbecker (talk) 20:16, 15 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:Sports + Portal:Nautical), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:25, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - Portal had 9 average daily pageviews in first half of 2019, as opposed to 377 for head article. Subpages include 7 articles and 7 biographies created in 2012, some minor edits to some articles between 2013 and 2017, no substantive maintenance as of Oct. 2019. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:29, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nominator, per Robert McClenon's comment, and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the 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. 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) 23:00, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Last support of this portal left it in circa 2012. Main article is already heavily tagged for verification issues (with nobody showing any interest in fixing). Navboxes on main article are very good and detailed, and propably kill any possible use this portal could serve. The Wikipedia:WikiProject Sailing project has also not had an edit for over a year (and very little edits since circa 2014). Nobody wants to support this portal, which is out-of-date and has errors, and nobody seems to want to read it. Britishfinance (talk) 13:10, 17 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per nominator, and as per metrics. Low readership, not very many articles, no substantive maintenance of articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:18, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - As an active member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Sailing, I can report that the project is still underway, with work being done to create articles on every sailboat type produced (eventually). Although our participation is low (okay, just me, recently), we are still adding many new articles: Wikipedia:WikiProject Sailing/New articles. That said, I have never seen the value of portals on Wikipedia in general and they certainly shouldn't remain unless they are kept up to date and someone commits to doing that. I think it will be a minimal loss for this one to be removed. - Ahunt (talk) 11:56, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. As others have noted, this is a long-neglected and long-outdated portals, with low readership.

It has neither any interested maintainers, nor a supportive WikiProject. The portal was created[1] on 11 April 2012‎ by Kasper2006 (talk · contribs), whose last edit to any part of the portal was only 15 days later, on 26 April 2012[2] (see Kasper2006Kasper2006's portal-space contribs). AFAICS, Kasper2006has never been a member of the project[3], and from what I can see of Kasper2006's portalspace edits, this appears to have been a sort of unannounced driveby creation on the assumption that others would maintain it.

This was unwise. The resulting portal shows minimal knowledge of sailing, with a severe bias towards one event. It focuses far too heavily on the Olympics, to the extent that Portal:Sailing/Sailing classes (last updated in April 2012) is all about the Olympics, omitting the vast majority of sailboat classes which have never been near the Olympics. There's no way that this portal even tries to offer a balanced overview of the sport. I don't in any way suggest intentional bias, but I do note that this is an example of the wider problem which I have repeatedly raised about portals being developed by editors who both lack deep knowledge of the topic and don't consult before adding articles.

Since then the portal has been almost completely abandoned: no new selected articles or biogs have been created, and the initial set has not been updated.

I see no sign that the portal has ever been supported by WP:WikiProject Sailing. The only talkpage mention of the portal is at WT:WikiProject Sailing/Archive 1#Portal:Sailing, where in April 2012 Kasper2006 announced its creation. No mention since.

There is clearly no WikiProject interest in maintaining or developing this portal, and never has been. If the project ever was interested in building a portals, it would do much better to start afresh, without this wildly unbalanced set of stale content forks. But the lack of reader interest indicates that any such effort would be a waste of time, so it's good to see that project editors such as @Ahunt are focusing instead on building actual content. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:06, 21 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.