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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Crime

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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. ‑Scottywong| [express] || 23:35, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Crime

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

Neglected portal.

Thirty selected articles created in January 2008. Only two have ever been updated.

Eighteen never-updated selected bios created in January 2008.

Errors

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 09:36, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep. Rated as High Importance and Featured Portal quality. Fixing its errors would take less effort than raising an MfD. Certes (talk) 10:52, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Correction. This is not rated as Featured Portal quality. It was FP in the past.
The reality is that the FP process was discontinued some years ago, but Certes and a few other portal fans pretend that the FP status continues on in a zombie state, even tho there is no mechanism for review or re-assessment.
The FP assessment and its preceding peer review are very sloppy: lots of cheering, but no a single mention of any criterion, let alone assessment against a checklist. There isn't even a single comment in either discussion about how the articles were selected, or whether the selection is balanced by era, geography, POV, etc.
As usual with portals, the whole focus is on quantity and formatting, with no sign of any concern at all for the content. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:29, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
User:Certes - How can we have Featured Portals when there are no portal guidelines? Perhaps the whole Featured Portal process was based on a myth. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:52, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
We no longer do, but the page met the featured portal criteria at the time of assessment. Certes (talk) 00:00, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The reality is that Portal:Criminal justice was assessed as FP standard over 11½ years ago.
  • Merge whatever is salvageable to Portal:Law, and redirect there. I was going to do that eventually anyway. bd2412 T 14:04, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Vote changed to delete, as the salvaging has been done. bd2412 T 05:45, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Note: I find about half of the selected articles would be suitable to merge into the law portal, including one as a selected case and three as selected statutes. bd2412 T 01:30, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Nice that you already did the work of separating the wheat from the chaff. IMHO you could move/merge those 4 selected items right now, so the rest can be easily redirected or deleted without worries. Nemo 08:09, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Nemo bis: Sorry if I was unclear. About half of the thirty selected articles are suitable for merger; most of these are suitable as selected articles, and four are suitable for other specified categories of selected items. bd2412 T 12:37, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • Sorry, but I disagree with keeping such a large portion of those selected articles. Nemo 07:28, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • @Nemo bis: Why don't you indicate which of those articles you think are suitable for inclusion in Portal:Law, and we'll work it out from there. bd2412 T 12:53, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question: can someone identify objective criteria for its selected articles and news items? I doubt that this set of gun violence is representative of "crime" and the news appear to follow no logic. For instance, it lists the 2 Italian police officers killed the other day, but not the 1+ French police officer(s) killed the day after. This portal seems condemned to be a bad tabloid. Nemo 18:05, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nemo raises a crucial question. I have yet to see any portal which spells out objective criteria for its selected articles and news items, let alone any discussion of their suitability or how they are applied. I have looked at a few dozen Featured Portal reviews, and I haven't found any of them where any such structured assessment took place.
The core issue of any portal should be the choice of what topics it displays. But most of the energy is put into formatting and to building the Rube Goldberg machine structures of the portal, and the selection criteria are utterly opaque.
That's one of the reasons why I oppose BD2412's desire merge to portals. Apart from the technical issue, and the stale nature of the content forks, the substance of it amounts to combining sets of lists whose basis has never even been disclosed. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:34, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The portal had a median of 41 daily pageviews and a mean of 59 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, which is better than most portals; the head article head 1408 daily pageviews. The portal has 48 selected articles, including biographies, which is better than most portals, and the articles appear to have been cosmetically edited in 2019, which is more than can be said for most portals.
  • Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information pagedowngraded to a failed proposal 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.
  • Comment - User:BrownHairedGirl raises a valid question that should be considered in why to create or keep any portal that uses author-selected or arbitrarily selected articles, as opposed to a category-based or rating-based selection. That is why any particular arbitrary subset of articles was selected.
  • Question - Why should this particular portal, which has better metrics than most portals, be deleted now? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question - Why were these particular articles selected? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Waiting to !vote until after reading more editor comments. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Since Wikipedia content is generally not machine-generated (with the exception of some generally mediocre runs of articles on towns generated from census data), editorial discretion is part of almost every process in the project. Individual editors decide for themselves what articles to work on, and in many cases, a small number of editors is responsible for every substantial decision about the content and presentation of the typical article. Editors who are trusted to use editorial discretion in writing articles exercise the same discretion in choosing which content is appropriate for portals. I have seen a number of portals where editors are provided with links to articles in the portal topic area that are B-class or above. They are not always drawn from, and a portal for which their is a failure in the quality of content selected (or for which the narrowness of the portal topic provides too few articles of quality to draw from) should be evaluated in part by that measure. Frankly, if we had an objective rule, for example that only B-class or above articles should be used as sources of selected content, it would be easy to write a bot that could identify all portal subpages in the project that fail that criteria. bd2412 T 04:31, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @BD2412: the problem with portals is that I have yet to see any portal in which there is even a disclosure of how that editorial discretion was exercised. What criteria were applied? Which articles were considered, but didn't make the cut?
These questions are absolutely central to any portal which selects content, but the choices are being made without even disclosure of criteria, let alone discussion.
Even worse, these choices are being made on a huge scale by editors with no wider involvement in or experience of the topic area. In the last few months, a huge number of portals on diverse topics have had their list of topics massively expanded by NA1K, whose lengthy track record of exceptionally poor judgement has been noted for years. The effect is that a large chunk of this neglected, mal-designed edifice consists of content selection by the editors least suited to that task. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:17, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: Please consider striking that unsupported allegation. Certes (talk) 10:41, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I considered your request, @Certes, and I firmly reject it. I can support my assertion with plenty of evidence if needed, but out of courtesy to the editor concerned I would prefer to avoid setting out the evidence in this discussion.
I dislike having to make critical comments about another editor, but in this case it is highly relevant to the issue being discussed. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:49, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • To answer Robert McClenon, there are some metrics which make this portal weaker than most others: 1) it's one of 130 or so surviving portals [with some subpage] created in 2006; 2) it's older than the median portal, with the average edit being from 2011 or earlier. It has amassed 1029 edits by 102 users, but in the end it's just old. Age may not be a problem in itself but it increases the chances of errors and other problems, of which there are plenty. Nemo 07:28, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Northamerica1000 and UnitedStatesian: As you have recently worked on this portal, do you have any insight into the selection of articles? bd2412 T 16:08, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per above and per WP:UNDUE. My main concern with this portal is that editorial discretion here is not just a matter of taste and innocuous preferences, as might happen on Portal:Design (also being discussed for deletion). The reality is that at the moment this portal singles out some specific countries, nationalities and persons as representative of "crime", and I'm not at all confident that the process is neutral, even under the more modest standard of neutrality allowed outside main namespace. Users are best served by going to Gun violence, Category:Gun violence in the United States and friends to get the same content in a more systematic and up to date fashion. I don't think that a single person would be able, alone, to sort it out: not even an experienced editor I trust a lot like BD2412. If we don't delete it now, it will either continue offering biased information for years or a few users will need to waste a lot of time going through a mess of ultimately worthless subpages, time which would be better spent on starting from scratch from the current consensus in the main namespace rather than on what one user thought was representative of our articles ten years ago. Nemo 07:28, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Nemo bis: I have identified the following items as being worth updating and moving under Portal:Law:
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/18 (as a selected statute)
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/23
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/24 (as a selected statute)
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/27 (as a selected statute)
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/July 2006 (as a selected case)
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/June 2006
      Portal:Crime/Selected article/November 2006 (as a selected case)
      Portal:Crime/Selected biography/2
      Portal:Crime/Selected biography/13
      Portal:Crime/Selected biography/15
      Portal:Crime/Selected picture/15
    • Let me know if you disagree with any of these. Cheers! bd2412 T 20:52, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Those topics appear relevant to me, yes (but I don't know much about the constitution of Australia or Puerto Rico). I did not check the status of all corresponding articles. You can use them in other portals without recycling ten years old copy-paste, though, so the inclusion of those topics in Portal:Law is not affected by the outcome of any discussion here. Nemo 03:42, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • The articles were generally FA at the time they were selected for Portal:Crime by User:Cirt (now long departed). The formatting is basically half done for Portal:Law purposes, so I find it easier to salvage them then to start over. Plus, it acknowledges the history of what came before, which I consider to be more closely aligned with the spirit of the GFDL. The rest, I have no further objection to deleting. bd2412 T 04:06, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • @BD2412: as above, I firmly oppose the retention of old content forks. There are no GFDL issues, because if forking is still to be used, then the forks should be rebuilt from scratch from the referenced scrutinised articles rather than from the forks.
            In any case, if you really want to add these articles to another portal, then I implore you in the name of all that is holy to do so without using content forks. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:52, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • I am going through and updating everything over the next few weeks. There is actually a syntax which allows the portal item to merely transclude a set number of paragraphs of the lede of the article, so that any change to the article is automatically conveyed to the portal item. I plan to implement that throughout Portal:Law, at least. bd2412 T 17:59, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
              • @BD2412: I have been primarily focused on portal cleanup for over 6 months, so I have known about that transclusion template since March. That's one of the reasons why I have resisting been resisting your desire to keep retain content forks: even if you want to retain excerpt display, the forks are un-needed. All you need is the article title.
                However, I do urge you to go a step further, and abandon the whole Rube Goldberg machine model of portals which display excepts. Those excerpts are redundant to the preview-on-mouseover available to all logged-out readers (i.e. the overwhelming majority of readers), and they have several negative effects: they slow page loading; they massively complicate the page; they still leave a portal which doesn't even display upfront a list of the articles in its set; unless they still use the hideous purge mechanism, page loading takes so long that it can time out on big article sets. So they are a usability fail as well as a maintenance fail. The German style of portal copied over by @Bermicourt: is vastly better; see e.g. Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It loads instantly, has simply markup which can be edited by any competent wiki-editor, and gives readers a clear list of the topics included. In some cases its usability would be improved by a brief summary of the article's significance, e.g.:
Pepper v Hart, landmark 1992 decision of the British House of Lords on the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation ◘ Bang Bang (1906–1981), eccentric elderly man in 1950s and 1960s Dublin ◘ Ian Paisley (1926–2014), loyalist politician and Protestant religious leader from Northern Ireland ◘ Michael Servetus (1509–1553), Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist burnt at the stake by Calvinists ◘ Lord Braxfield (1722–1799) Scottish judge known for his harshness.
Better all round. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:07, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The first thing that catches my eye on that page is a checkerboard-smattering of disambiguation links. I don't know whether the page structure is the cause of that (I have fixed such links in all sorts of portals) but they appear on the page and it is not immediately clear how to fix them here. I also note that this is a portal for a very narrow topic (there is no Wikipedia:WikiProject Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) and it is not even in the top 500 portals by page views, with about .01% of the pageviews of the article, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Pretty as it is, I don't see how it can survive. bd2412 T 22:57, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The portal for Meck-Vorpom is not meant to be "pretty" and will never attract the page views of an article especially as the now downgraded POG only suggest one link from mainspace. However it is extremely useful to me in identifying what articles are still needed for comprehensive coverage of the topic and I can quickly navigate around the topic articles to improve quality. I've used these portals to create or translate thousands of articles for Wikipedia, but I'm giving up on that as they get deleted. BTW the project for Meck-Vorpom is WikiProject Germany; it's a German state - we don't need subprojects for each portal - each state portal is a mini-project which Germany editors are free to engage with at any stage. But go ahead - scrap our work - and watch the article coverage dry up. Bermicourt (talk) 08:22, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note, I've fixed the disambiguation links. bd2412 T 23:08, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BD2412 and Bermicourt: you have both entirely missed my point about Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I wasn't commenting on its state of maintenance or its viewing rates or whether it should survive or on Bermicourt's bizarre fantasies about links.
I was noting that its design is vastly superior to the Rube Goldberg machine portals, and recommending that BD2412 use that format for the portal he is rebuilding. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:14, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I have made some adjustments in this direction to Portal:Law, particularly by incorporating the template in the lede and by including explanations of the significance of statutes and cases before the selected statute and selected case sections. However, I do not think that it is possible to structure a portal on a broad topic like law in the way that one might structure a portal on a national subdivision, with lists of things like local characteristics, landforms, and tourist destinations. bd2412 T 16:48, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, BD2412, the portal can be structured according to the topic. But there's nothing in the nature of the topic to prevent using a list of the articles in each section, rather than just an excerpt. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:41, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per above. The selection criteria issue and the BLP violation are especially concerning. It is neglected as the nom states; there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Relatively 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 or removal of links rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 01:19, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete like all portals, sigh, waste of time. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:37, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete due to BLP violations and other issues due to lack of maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:55, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete yet another farm of stale content forks, replete with BLP violations, and no maintiners in sight. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:09, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I am seeing the same rationale on many MfD. ow page views and not enough maintainence. Neither is a rationale for deletion. Two relevant points are found in WP:POPULARPAGE and WP:NOTCLEANUP. The portal is a service to our readers and a navigation tool. Wm335td (talk) 16:35, 12 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - It is not clear what service to the readers is provided by this portal or by portals that have low pageview rates and are not maintained. (I am aware that portals seem to have a mystical appeal to some editors, but I am looking for something that is subject to rational explanation.) Robert McClenon (talk) 06:23, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It also appears that "some editors" on the delete side have an "everything must go" mentality despite community consensus. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:16, 14 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - How does WP:POPULARPAGE and WP:NOTCLEANUP NOT apply here? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:15, 14 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • It does not apply because we're not discussing notability. Nemo 06:10, 15 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • You are confusing arguements used in the AfD of articles (where notability is the central issue), with MfDs of portals (where other issues come into play, and particularly whether there are the editors present to maintain what is a dymanic entity, and prevent it from becoming forked/misleading etc.). Britishfinance (talk) 16:32, 15 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Abandoned and forked page with no maintainer(s), and no reader interest. Adds nothing over the mainpage+navboxes. BLP violations are another concern (back to the problem of abandoned portals). Nobody seems to want to properly maintain this, and nobody seems to want to read it. Britishfinance (talk) 16:32, 15 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The topic of "crime" is so large we don't even have a "WikiProject Crime" - we have a "Wikiproject (country) Crime." There's absolutely no reason we can't have a portal on this topic, and while some of the delete !voters bring up valid points, they are points we can use to fix and update portals. SportingFlyer T·C 05:10, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. But this is not about topic notability (unlike an article AfD). This portal is a dynamic object (like the Mainpage, Wikipedia's #1 portal), and it is abandoned (and with some serious content issues). Even Wikipedia:WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography, which is still somewhat active, seems to want nothing to do with the Crime portal. Anybody can try a "fix" now, but unless we have editors who are committed to maintaining what is a dynamic object, we don't have a portal with a future. We have to be smart with our declining relative resources (e.g # of articles vs. # live editors), and ensure that we don't end up with bad content that degrades our good content in the eyes of a reader. Britishfinance (talk) 14:26, 16 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.


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