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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Barack Obama

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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) 02:09, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Barack Obama

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Portal:Barack Obama (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
(convenience link: subject article is Barack Obama)
(Wikipedia:WikiProject Barack Obama courtesy talkpage notified)

Delete Was going to prepare a bundled nomination along with Portal:Donald Trump to show I'm neutral, but Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Donald Trump beat me to it; all of the same reasons raised there apply here: both have high risk of WP:BLP and WP:NPOV issues; both are classic examples of WP:RECENTism and WP:OWNership. The lack of any references requirement in the portalspace should be determining here. Most fundamentally, each president is just one out of 45, and so difficult to see how any recent one yet meets the breadth-of-subject-area requirements of the WP:POG guideline. UnitedStatesian (talk) 01:44, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually all of the other U.S. president portals were deleted in that MfD, believe it or not. UnitedStatesian (talk) 02:06, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oh dang, you are right! I just checked out Portal:Abraham Lincoln, and it's the same story. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:25, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Now THAT would be a broad enough topic for a portal. From Bibliography of Abraham Lincoln: "There have been 16,000 books published on Lincoln—125 on the assassination alone—more than any other American." UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:31, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Presumably they were all single navbox based, and so not related to this (or Donald Trump). Espresso Addict (talk) 19:15, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Unrelated, except that the only reason TTH created the other 43 president portals is because these two existed. TTH never met an incomplete set that he did not want to complete. Precedent is important. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:37, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I recall this being discussed. Its article base is on the limit of what I think a good portal might need. Stats: only 7 articles, 14 images, some quotations, and a few DYK sets. There are 26 FA/FL/GAs, so it should be easy to expand. The news pulls from Wikinews, which is rarely a good idea, and the most recent item is Aug 2018, which is only tangentially related. Fetchcomms, who saw this through the featured process, appears retired and the wikiproject is marked as inactive; they've been notified, so let's see if anyone is watching. More generally, I don't think this suffers the same problem as Portal:Donald Trump, as Obama is no longer in office, has stepped back from the public eye, and (as far as one can tell from the UK) was never as polarising as Trump. He is also not standing for office in the next few years, afaik. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:15, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Its featured portal discussion is at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Barack Obama/archive2. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:50, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete in favour of Wikipedia:WikiProject Barack Obama for editor scope and in favour of Barak Obama for reader scope. Living people are particularly unsuitable for portals, due to their lack of being watched, and inherent difficulties of NPOV compliance spilling into BLP risk, and reputational risk for Wikipedia. This Portal page amounts to an editorial page written by a Wikipedians and nominally intended for general reader consumption. It distracts from mainspace, and abandons the Wikipedia principle of explicitly referencing sources. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:46, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Single person Portals are definitely too narrow. Comparing, Portal:Muhammad should be merged into Portal:Islam which should be merged into Portal:Religion for NPOV benefits. Similarly for Portal:Jesus. Portal:Moses, despite having been argued to be the most influential person of all time, doesn't exist because non-contentious individuals don't draw volunteer support. Portal:Genghis Khan (doesn't exist due to systematic bias) and Portal:Julius Caesar (exists due to systematic bias) both belong inside Portal:History. All of these portals are inferior to articles for coverage, navigation, and content policy compliance. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:52, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Two innocuous examples prove the point. The very first DYK entry says ".. that Barack Obama is the 22nd cousin two times removed of U.S. Senator John McCain (pictured), who was Obama's opponent in the 2008 U.S. presidential election?" Interesting! I would like to find out more about that! Clicking on each of the blue links in that DYK fails to reveal any cited source that shows that. Shouldn't information about living people be cited in a reliable source? "22 percent of German women would have an affair with Barack Obama"? Really! Guess what, no confirming reliable source revealed when the blue link is followed. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:35, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Did You Know that... Wikinews Barack Obama category - April 2: Israel approves first West Bank settlement in over 20 years has to be parsed as : Sunday, April 2, 2017, Barack Obama used his final interview to criticize... On the other hand, only 20 bots lost_readers per day are facing this unmaintained thing. An urging question: has Donald Trump ever been able to look through a telescope ? Pldx1 (talk) 10:51, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Waiting for a comment if any from User:Sceptre and for my own further research. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:17, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The Lincoln portal was based on a single navbox. We have not established that Presidents are narrow topics for portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:19, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Portal:George Washington was also deleted, but was also based on a single navbox. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:20, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I have not yet !voted on either Portal:Barack Obama or Portal:Donald Trump. I did vote on Barack Obama and Donald Trump, but that is a different issue. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:45, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep – Plenty of subject matter to justify a portal. Of course it's not in a good shape at the moment, and needs volunteers to maintain it, but deletion is not cleanup. — JFG talk 01:46, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Per JFG, and my comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Donald Trump, commenting here to show I'm neutral, as stated by nom it may be outdated, but that is an argument to improve the portal, not delete it. - CHAMPION (talk) (contributions) (logs) 09:28, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. I am unpersuaded that any single person is a sufficiently broad enough topic to satisfy the requirement of WP:POG and WP:PORTAL that the subject be a "broad topic area". The necessary breadth is achieved only by expanding the scope to cover all the things that happened under his presidency, as if he had been some sort of absolute monarch who was personally the defining factor of tho events.
Just as significantly, a portal on a living person is a wide-open vulnerability to attack, especially when they are as polarising as Obama. Watchlisting the main Portal:Barack Obama page is not enough, because per Help:Watchlist#Limitations "When a watched page contains transcluded text, such as templates, the form of the page may change as a result of changes to the transcluded pages. These changes will not show up on your watchlist unless you are watching the transcluded pages as well.". So to watch this portal, editors need to watchlist every one of the 82 subpages listed at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Barack Obama. How any editors are gonna do that?
All of those subpages except a handful of technical pages is a content fork of their respective articles, in breach of WP:REDUNDANTFORK. If this portal survives MFD, then I will MFD the content subpages. If the portal stays, it needs to lose the subpages.
And as discussed at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Donald Trump, there are two potential bias issues; the selection of articles for inclusion, and the use recognized content lists. Those list are designed for internal use, and show only the topics which editors have chosen to develop to a high standard. That list is designed in any[ way to reflect Wikipedia's NPOV policy, so it should not be placed on reader-facing pages.
Why on earth does anyone want to keep this can of worms when the portal averaged only 20 pageviews per day in Jan–Feb 2019? The head article got 27,127 pageviews per day in the same period, which is 1,346 times as many. What's the point of this almost-unused can of worms, other than as busywork? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:43, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As I commented in other portal deletion discussions, I agree that they are generally useless wastelands, but the community has decided against removing them wholesale. The valuable approach you have taken of examining them one by one entails lots of work, but I hope it will draw attention to the issues and motivate some maintainers to appear out of thin air. — JFG talk 19:25, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @JFG. It has been a mountain of work, but the scrutiny I have been doing has certainly taught me a lot about them, which I have tried to share in detailed nominations. As I move on from automated portals to examining more manual portals, I am struck by so many of the old manual portals have been abysmally neglected, often for over a decade. So I can see why TTH wanted to automate them, but unfortunately he was usually indiscriminate in how he automated them ... and then he used the automation to unleash a tsunami of spam which still isn't all gone.
Apart from the ongoing cleanup of abandoned or spammed junk, and the continued lack of any broad consensus on what portals are for or how they should do it, the biggest systemic problem now is the many forests of subpages. They are content forks, mostly little watched (if at all), and many of them are way out of date; all of them are attack vulnerabilities. Whatever else happens with portals, those forks need to go. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:49, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As a practical approach, as opposed to MfD-ing 100000 subpages, for these old subpages forked and intended for transclusions, I suggest: (1a) speedy redirect them back to their source; (1b) if you don't know their source, speedy delete WP:CSD#G12, the author did not write it from scratch; (2) if the parent Portal page is ever deleted, delete them all subpages per WP:CSD#G8. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:58, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment- This empty thing, a slideshow with only SEVEN articles, is what is called a Former Featured Portal. Doesn't appear as a positive advertisement for this kind of beast. Either this guy was so lazy that nothing more can be said after EIGHT years in office, or the portal fans are so lazy that they are unable to provide a decent navigation tool covering the topic. Indeed, a portal is not supposed to say "an apple is a fruit", and wait for someone else has learned something more about apples. A portal is supposed to provide an actual navigation tool to each and every reader (20 per day, including crawling robots) who is sufficiently lost to come there. Pldx1 (talk)
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.


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