Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Video games

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: no consensus. (non-admin closure) CLYDE ^{TALK TO ME}/_{STUFF DONE} 01:51, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Video games

This MfD is being submitted after a strawpoll at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games#Portal:Video_games. The purpose there was to judge whether any members of the project had interest in actually maintaining this Portal. The overwhelming consensus was no, and so I'm bringing the portal to MFD.

This portal has a staggering 110,000 incoming links, which leads to a mere 200 views a day. The content on the portal itself however is largely out of date and unmaintained, ranging from last update being from 7 years ago to 14 years ago. The talk page hasn't had a meaningful discussion since 2022, and 2020 before that. The FA and GA sections are the only thing up-to-date, because they feed directly from WP:VG's FA and GA lists, which are maintained. The "Selected Pictures" have not been updated since ~2008-2009. The DKY lists has not been updated since it was created in 2016. The "this month in video gaming" section has not been updated since ~2008-2009. The "Selected Topics" have not been updated since ~2012-2014. The "General Images" carousel feeds off five very broad articles without any changes or maintenance in a decade.

This portal is unmaintained and unwanted by the editors who would be most knowledgeable for maintaining it. It's views are driven entirely by sheer amount of links. There was a suggestion to remove any unmaintained sections, but that almost makes it simply a mirror of WP:VG. Providing readers with 10 year out of date content is a disservice. -- ferret (talk) 20:18, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - not useful to readers, not read by readers, not maintained, not going to be maintained. --Pres N 20:26, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per both above. Sergecross73 msg me 20:28, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep I don't think that a portal not being manually updated and curated merits its deletion - it's perfectly feasible for a portal to be automated and just be there as a landing page for users interested in learning more about the topic. WP:VG is more of a Wikipedia editor page than a landing page for readers. Furthermore, the strawpoll was entirely made up of highly engaged editors who would have less than zero reason to visit the Portal in the first place, making for a skewed view of its usefulness or lack thereof. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 21:31, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If a strong majority of engaged, experienced, knowledgeable editors have no intention on maintaining it, who can you realistically count on to maintain this? It's not the sort of thing that passerby/casual editors would want to, or even be capable of, maintaining. I'm not sure I see the realistic path forward here. Even the few people not supportive of deletion in the straw poll didn't show any actual personal interest in helping (yourself included.) Sergecross73 msg me 22:11, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
All of these points have already been discussed and argued. Why push forward with the same talking points if nothing new has happened since the last RfC? WP:MfD isn't cleanup for a job that can be automated. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:38, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We just had a new discussion at WT:VG this week and what I'm talking about was the general sentiment. I'm literally talking about new developments. Sergecross73 msg me 00:10, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Since we are only talking about this one portal then its fine. I just remember how long and drawn out it was last time is all. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:12, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Are we seriously going to have another round when it comes to ending portals? (See: WP:ENDPORTALS) There is no policy or guideline based rationales given in this MfD nomination, but there is a prior consensus. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:31, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No argument for ending portals is being presented or made. A specific portal is being proposed as unmaintained, out of date, and not useful. There's no policy or guideline based rationales to express, other than to lay out these details, because we have no "Portal deletion policy". WP:DEL doesn't even mention portals once. Are you saying that because of WP:ENDPORTALS, not a single portal can ever be evaluated? -- ferret (talk) 22:38, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, you made a good point, but I still see automation as an alternative. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:41, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and automate. There is no reason why this portal needs to be manually updated. "This month in gaming history" is a nice addition but can be deleted if its dated. - - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:49, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would tend to agree with this. I fully admit I don't have interest in manually maintaining a portal, but I don't think that's a "gotcha" that makes the argument fall apart. I do not believe a fully automated portal page that pulls from recent developments in the video game space would be detrimental to readers. It would still highlight "behind the scenes" information that readers may not normally bother checking, and lay out information in an easily navigable format. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 05:10, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's a fix that has since been done for other portals with the same issues Ferret has here. "Out of date and unmaintained" issues fall under WP:CLEANUP, which deletion isn't meant for. That being said, the biggest issue here isn't the nomination here but the prior discussion which indicates almost no support within the VG project to keep the portal page. Why force a Wikiproject to keep a project page that they don't want? This has me more towards a "weak delete" lately regarding this debate. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:40, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's arguable the poll was affected by how the question was posed: with the sole choices being to manually maintain it or delete it altogether. I wonder if the possibility of full automation was brought up how it would have affected consensus, since all the "delete" votes were along the lines of "we shouldn't have to maintain this". ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 19:18, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per ferret, who is preaching the Wiki-gospel here. Panini! • 🥪 06:50, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per comments in the previous WT:VG thread. It's one thing if a portal is rarely used but at least mildly useful for the readers who do click on it; if it's useless and disappointing even for readers who try it anyway, it's better just deleted. So there is a stronger reason to delete here than just general distaste for portals. (But, at risk of rehashing old arguments, to be clear we probably should delete many more portals - this one is at least part of a WikiProject with some activity. Old, abandoned portals that don't even have WikiProjects that notice should probably be even more deletable. But this gets back into the age-old "why do we still even have Portals" debate, see old arguments there.) SnowFire (talk) 01:43, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SnowFire: I don't think anyone would object to deleting Portals with no Wikiprojects attached to them. The whole idea of Portals is to highlight the achievements of a Wikiproject. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Really? Surely it's to highlight Wikipedia's content relevant to a topic. If the portal scope coincides with that of a WikiProject, and if that WikiProject wants to update the portal occasionally, that's even better, but I don't think a portal is mainly here to highlight the WikiProject's achievements. Certes (talk) 23:00, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comments - Not yet !voting.
- - This is a very popular portal, with 243 daily page views in 2022, and 228 daily page views in 2021. By contrast, the lead article, Video games, had 3834 daily page views in 2022.
  - The portal is very popular because it is well advertised, with an astonishing 110,000 backlinks.
  - This was a very extensively developed portal when it was last maintained in 2016, with 128 articles and 187 DYKs. The subject area of video games is one in which change and progress are rapid and frequent, and the selection of articles is probably obsolete.
  - The architecture of this portal is an old-style architecture with partial page copies of selected articles. Therefore any article on a video game for which the article has been modified in the past seven years is now obsolete. Any article on a video game that was developed in the past seven years simply is not included in the portal.
  - A five-year-old RFC against ending portals is hardly a useful argument against deleting one portal.
  - Although the community decided five years ago not to delete portals, the community decided four years ago that there are no portal guidelines
  - There is no consensus as to what the purpose of portals is.
  - In the absence of comprehensible reasons for portals, it appears that there are mystical reasons for portals. No editor is required to accept another editor's mystical reasons.
  - Consensus Can Change, and there does not appear to be a consensus about any aspect of portals.
  - Is User:Knowledgekid87 offering to automate the maintenance of the portal, or are they only saying that we should find someone to automate the maintenance of the portal?
  - The combination of the high popularity of this portal and the absence of any maintenance in seven years illustrates that portals not only do not maintain themselves but do not find portal maintainers, even when the portals find users. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert McClenon (talk • contribs) 05:25, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Question @Knowledgekid87: I've made some changes to the portal, what do you think?—Alalch E. 15:20, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This certainly LOOKS better, with many redundant sections removed or shifted. It's a much cleaner layout, which was a problem I didn't highlight before. DYK seems automated, but the new biography section is a manually curated list. The rest remains hand curated as well. All of the non-automated content needs a deep review by topic knowledgeable individuals, which loops back to the fact the WP:VG project does not have a desire to do so. -- ferret (talk) 15:39, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It looks much better to me, thanks for your work! =) - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:52, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The featured topics have replaced "selected topic", and it's actually automated in the sense that it's a transclusion of the current list of featured topics. I hear what you're saying about biographies, but the manually curated list of biographies is from relatively stable wikiproject classifications and ratings of articles as essential and vital. I don't really think that the list needs to be complete, and if there are a few suboptimal entires, it isn't a major problem. That is something that can be reviewed on a five-year basis.
The "This month in gaming history" box can't be automated and I agree that it's the biggest problem. ~~Should probably just remove it~~ (edit: Done; replaced with something that is automated). The images are non-automated too. —Alalch E. 15:54, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I don't think that portals are actually good for featuring content and that they can truly be sub-main pages, despite that being the original idea. My view on portals is that they should be seen as pages with the primary function of collating links from disparate namespaces / navigational methods and links to sister projects and even outside resources:
1. primary article
2. primary outline
3. primary index
4. primary timeline
5. primary list of lists
6. category tree
7. primary navbox and other important navboxes
8. glossary
9. WikiProject
10. related portals
11. relevant content on other Wikimedia projects
12. relevant resources outside of Wikimedia (if appropriate; for example thew link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in Portal:Philosophy is appropriate)

I think that if a portal can fulfill this function (meaning: if most of the listed things actually exist), there's no need to ever delete that portal, and what should happen instead is just removing non-policy compliant boxes that have always been all about featuring this or that, and are not necessary for this link collating function as I've described it. I don't think that a hypothetical portal that doesn't feature any content (no need for it not to feature featured articles however) and just contains navigation would have a net negative effect on a reader's experience. Such a portal would not require maintenance. Based on this, there's no need to delete the majority of portals about broad topics (which, for example, have an outline, a navbox, a WikiProject, which are meaningfully represented on the sister projects etc), and this is one of the portals that don't need to be deleted. Some much more niche portals about topics that are not so high-level as video games could probably use deleting. My mystical 2c.—Alalch E. 16:54, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Delete: Viewers who want to see a video game portal probably want to see a portal that is mostly about video games of the last seven years, which this portal is not. It does not appear that new articles have been selected in place of the previous articles that were selected in 2016, and the obsolescence of the selected articles is the main drawback of this portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:22, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Allow Recreation if the new portal has an architecture that does not involve partial copies of pages, which are content forks, or has other automation such as was suggested by User:Knowledgekid87. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:22, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
From a look at the wikitext, recreation is already almost complete. The architecture no longer involve partial copies of pages. It's created dynamically, and automatically mirrors edits made to the showcased articles. Subpages such as Portal:Video games/Recognized content are updated automatically by bot, so new FAs and GAs will appear in the portal without manual intervention. If the main objection is that the WikiProject doesn't want to spend time curating the portal, then there is no longer any reason to delete, because most of the portal will remain current without manual curation. Certes (talk) 23:08, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep. No deadline, wiki not paper, etc. Andre🚐 04:38, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:HEY. Alalch E. has done a splendid job, not only with a one-off update but by installing automated processes to mirror changes within articles and to add new GAs and FAs as they occur. Although it would be helpful if the WikiProject took an interest, the portal can continue to refresh its content and remain of acceptable standard without their involvement. Certes (talk) 23:13, 11 October 2023 (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.