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. The edit histories of deleted pages are still preserved, they are just not accessible until they are restored. If they are needed for whatever reason, they can be restored. ‑Scottywong| [spout] ||21:00, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Portal:East Timor has been categorized since May 2019 as an abandoned country portal. This is accurate, because it appears to have been stillborn in 2009. It was "restarted" in January 2019 by User:The Transhumanist, and then reverted to the curated version in May 2019 by User:BrownHairedGirl. The portal was created in 2009 by User:Wiki Raja who last edited in 2017.
Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. This imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained. Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
Robert McClenon, Regarding "the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page", you may want to check that. It is finally correctly tagged again. We have never had "real portal guidelines". Portals were an unfettered hobby/experiment that the community almost completely ignored for 13 years. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:30, 9 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:Asia), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 23:12, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - Like other small and newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, there is a shortage of coverage in Wikipedia, known as systemic bias. What is needed is more articles about countries in Asia and Africa. Underviewed and unmaintained portals do not contribute to the creation of those articles, but any volunteer effort put into maintenance of portals further distracts from any creation of articles. Systemic bias is not a reason to keep abandoned portals. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:16, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Move (without redirect) to Wikipedia:WikiProject East Timor/Portal. It's a very new country, rapidly developing, and the subject of systematic bias. This portal doesn't serve as a portal, but let's not discourage the East Timorese editors by deleting this pretty page. It's actual function of merit is showcasing editor work on the country, and for that purpose the appropriate location is as a subpage of the WikiProject (if not as the WikiProject main page itself). It is not for readers, but for editors. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:27, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete (or WikiProjectify): Unfortunately, this portal's subject is by no means immune to Wikipedia's systemic bias, as per Robert McClenon's findings. ToThAc (talk) 23:30, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Move (without redirect) to Wikipedia:WikiProject East Timor/Portal per SmokeyJoe. It is probably best to preserve the edit histories of at least those portals that align with specific WikiProjects. bd2412T02:44, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Minor correction: the portal guidelines aren't even considered an information page anymore; they have been retagged as a failed proposal. Geolodus (talk) 05:44, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per above 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, being for navigation instead, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated and useless portals to articles and say they should just be fixed. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised 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. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve potentially 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.
I see no reason to think that saving the edit history is worthwhile, or that saving this as part of a WikiProject will help combat systemic bias or help avoid discouraging East Timorese editors. As the nom points out, the portal was stillborn. Nothing worth preserving. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:40, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nominator. This is a poorly-made, and long-abandoned portal which at best adds little-or-no value. It is a waste of the time of readers.
Comment There are not enough topics for East Timor to have a portal under my proposed guideline (4 FA+GA.) Portals should highlight featured content and provide a quality navigational structure for the topic's content. Therefore I recommend either moving as per above or deleting without prejudice until more East Timorese content is added - though I could see making a keep argument that portals at country level are worth keeping. SportingFlyerT·C05:31, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I fail to see how any purpose is served by retaining a portal which displays only a trivially small set of articles. Maybe SF could explain.
And also, anyone can write any proposed guideline they like, but unless and until it is adopted by consensus, it is simply a personal essay carries no weight. If there is any actual reasoning in such an essay, then the proposer should set out that reasoning instead of relying on the logical fallacy of proof by assertion.
As to the idea portals should provide a quality navigational structure for the topic's content, I have yet see any portal which makes any plausible attempt to do that, apart from the German mega-navbox-style portals. The rest are just various forms of showcase. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 16:27, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Similar issue to my comments on Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Massachusetts. This portal abandonment is due to the fact that the Main Article (which is in decent condition), gives a better structured guide through the topic content (with links that can be mouse-overed). The Main Article Navbox is a better and up to date (via its transclusion on many articles) way to navigate the topic. And the Project page of Wikipedia:WikiProject East Timor/Main Articles has a fully structured catalogue of the topic articles with not POV/forking issues.
The portal has thus been "rationally abandoned", as other WP tools provide a superior service for the reader in terms of content, navigation or article cataloguing. This effect of "rational abandonment" is in evidence on hundreds of WP portals, and it is not going to change (in fact it is only getting worse). Britishfinance (talk) 17:12, 18 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.