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. Consensus is for the deletion of this portal. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 18:15, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Bulgarian Empire (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

• Portal:Bulgarian Empire is one of two abandoned country portals. This country is a more than a thousand years older than East Timor. One question is whether the portal has been abandoned; the country was not abandoned, but rather conquered by the Ottoman Empire. The portal was originated in 2007, and has twenty articles, which were content-forked between 2007 and 2011. Some of them were tweaked through 2015. There does not appear to have been any maintenance since 2015, so the portal may have been abandoned.
• The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore 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. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense 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. One can argue over whether a regional great power that contended with neighboring empires a thousand years ago is a broad subject area, but it does not have a portal maintainer.
• The portal had 7 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 151 average daily pageviews for the head article, which is normally not enough to support a portal anyway.
• The following table shows data for Portal:Bulgarian Empire and related portals including its historical enemies/rivals, and the portal for modern Bulgaria.

Robert McClenon (talk) 12:31, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as nominator. Very low readership, no recent maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 12:31, 10 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:Bulgaria), without creating duplicate entries.

Note that the territory of the Bulgarian Empire was significantly larger than that of the modern state of Bulgaria; at a rough guess, three to five times its size. So I wondered whether Portal:Bulgaria was a suitable replacement. But a look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Portal:Bulgarian_Empire suggests to me that it probably is suitable, because most of the topics have a clear cultural connection to Bulgaria. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:37, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per nominator.

This is a modestly large portal, with 20 entries in each of Portal:Bulgarian Empire/Selected article and Portal:Bulgarian Empire/Selected biography. However, there is no ongoing maintenance, so the entries are rotting. In other MFDs some defenders of portals have tried to argue that such abandonment doesn't matter much for historical topics, because the past doesn't change.

That view misunderstands both history and Wikipedia. History is not static. Our knowledge and understanding of history is constantly evolving, as new evidence is discovered, and as new scholarship re-evaluates existing evidence. For one example of how our understanding evolves, see Historiography of the causes of World War I.

Wikipedia is a work-in-progress. The early versions of an article may be short and patchy. Their subsequent development is often uneven, as material is added on one aspect of the topic, or one view of the topic. These developments happen erratically, reflecting the interests and expertise of individual editors. Our better articles (esp those of FA or GA-class) have often been completely rewritten by someone with a scholarly overview of the topic.

The structure of Wikipedia articles also changes. Topics may be split, or existing splits rearranged, so the choice of wikilinks made a decade ago may be wildly out-of-step with the current organisation of Wikipedia coverage in that topic area.

And of course, articles may be created on topics which had previously been neglected or even omitted.

All those factors mean both that:

• the selection of articles made a decade ago may no longer be appropriate, and
• the content which was forked ten years ago may be way out of date, even though the topic is a thousand years old.

That's why portals need ongoing maintenance. Not just tweaking of their presentation and reworkings of the abominable Rube Goldberg machine structures which they nearly all use. Not even additions to the list by the prolific editor who runs between wildly disparate topics in which they have zero expertise, adding more article while never explaining their choice; their manic listmaking is neither curation nor maintenance. Portals need actual curation by editors with genuine expertise in the subject area, and our readers are as ill-served by the hyperactivity of the ignorant as by the neglect of the experts.

In this case, there is no sign that anyone wants to maintain the portal, let alone anyone with expertise in the topic. There is no directly-related WikiProject to assess articles or to provide a pool of editors with subject expertise. The closest project I can find is WP:WikiProject Bulgaria, but I can find in its talkpage archives not a single mention of this portal. In fact, there are no links to this portal from the whole of Wikipedia-talk namespace, so it's clear that no WikiProject has ever shown any interest in it.

So is there simply no basis on which to sustain this portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:52, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - The explanation by User:BrownHairedGirl about the evolving nature of historiography is important. It is true that the past does not change, and in this regard history is unlike politics. But our understanding of the past does change, and an up-to-date article or portal about a historical topic must reflect current scholarship in history. It is almost as stupid to maintain that our knowledge of the past is static as it would be to discount current research in the sciences, where our knowledge of the present and of the natural world is evolving and expanding. The past does not change, but our understanding of the past does change, so that historical articles, and historical portals if we have them, must be kept up-to-date with current historiography. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:43, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Note old fake DYKs. This portal has 8 "Did you know" sub-pages, each containing 4 entries. All of these 8 subpages were created in 2008, and so far as I can see no significant change has been made since then to any of the entries.

Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section". Eleven-year articles are not in any way "new", so this is just a WP:TRIVIA section.

I also did a detailed check on two of the pages: Portal:Bulgarian Empire/Did you know/5 and Portal:Bulgarian Empire/Did you know/7. I checked all the articles for any sign of uses in WP:DYK or its predecessors, and found none. The closest was on /Did you know/5 where Ahtum redirects to Ajtony, which was featured in WP:Recent additions/2016/June#12_June_2016. However, that was 8 years after the /Did you know/5 was created, and the fact asserted is different.

So my check of 25% of the "DYK" items in this portal finds that none of them has any connection to the scrutinised process of selection for WP:DYK. On the contrary, they are all fakes which usurp the good name of DYK. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:44, 11 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. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:52, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Per nom. Adds nothing above the main articles+navbox. Its abandonment will only depreciates the percieved quality of the main article, which I have tidyied up (and other related articles) in the eyes of the reader. Britishfinance (talk) 12:03, 15 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.