Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nintendo

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) 05:24, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Nintendo

Portal:Nintendo is a well-viewed unmaintained single-vendor portal. In the first half of 2019, the portal had 61 average daily pageviews, as contrasted with 4419 for the article. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Nintendo shows 20 articles, 16 pictures, and other pages. The articles were created in 2007, and a few in 2009, and some are unchanged, and some have been tweaked in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, or 2016, including two that have had links corrected in 2019. There is no designated maintainer. There are three problems with this portal. First, it is not being updated, and its maintenance is inconsistent, which does not comply with the portal guidelines. Second, 20 articles is, based on the usual version of the portal guidelines, a bare minimum, with no effort to increase the coverage since 2009. Those are issues with the portal guidelines, which portal advocates have challenged. If the portal guidelines are not guidelines, we should use common sense, except that it is obvious that portal advocates do not have that quality. The third problem is that this single-company portal is non-neutral and reads like a catalog of Nintendo products. The neutral point of view requirement predates the portal guidelines, is non-negotiable, and is the second pillar of Wikipedia. This portal hasn't changed much in ten years and isn't about to become neutral or to be improved. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:20, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save some one-off maintenance by passing editors. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This portal has had a decade of no steady maintainers and it had a low 61 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article Nintendo had 4,419 views per day in the same period).

POG also states that portals be associated with a wikiproject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject Nintendo is just a redirect to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Nintendo taskforce, which has some activity, but the portal was last mentioned on the talk page in Aug. 2009 about updating the sorely out-of-date portal, but got no response. This shows a clear lack of interest in this portal. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Nintendo is not a broad enough topic to attract readers and maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:10, 23 September 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:Video games), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:42, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Second, 20 articles is, based on the usual version of the portal guidelines, a bare minimum, with no effort to increase the coverage since 2009. is clearly a faulty argument; there are 20 articles which are selected, but from a total, you are welcome to peruse the subcategories of Category:Nintendo. There are thousands of articles associated with the portal accordingly, and I need not get into the specifics here.
The third problem is that this single-company portal is non-neutral and reads like a catalog of Nintendo products. is also ludicrous if not fallacious on its face; one would expect a portal about Nintendo to be about Nintendo products, history, you name it. Saying this is a failure of NPOV seems to indicate misunderstanding of what NPOV actually means, and I'd invite you to try that line of logic for deleting the many video games we document today (good luck).
That said, I'm practical, and tend to think that portals in their entirety should be removed, not least because of the many arguments on their general use (i.e. that they aren't used and that we have been in a post-portal world since before Wikipedia existed). A portal with 1.5% page views of its corresponding main topic article is not good enough for continued maintenance. --Izno (talk) 15:54, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - I agree with Izno that there could be plenty of articles used- Cat:Nintendo articles by quality lists 37 FAs, 9 FLs, and 173 GAs. The fact remains that no one is maintaining this portal or adding these articles, and the portal itself is not doing anything with presentation or information to justify a separate Portal. --Pres N 16:08, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - My thought on neutral point of view is that there are topics where it is difficult to maintain neutral point of view, where Wikipedia must take special care to ensure neutrality. In these areas, Wikipedia should focus the effort of maintaining neutrality on those reader-facing pages that are essential to Wikipedia's mission; those are our articles. We must present neutral coverage of non-neutral subjects, such as companies, and hostile nations, in articles, even if special procedures are needed. We do not need to make a special effort to present neutral coverage of non-neutral subjects in portals. We do not need portals on nations that are at war; we do not need portals on companies that are in legal competition with other companies. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:05, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per Robert McClenon and Newshunter12; I also oppose re-creation. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:20, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the nominator @Robert McClenon. This portal's 61 pageviews per day is better than the average of ~20, but it still falls some way short of the threshold of 100 at which portals seem to start to become viable (i.e. they are much more likely to have multiple maintainers, and less likely to just be the child of a single editor).

In this case, there has not even consistently been one maintainer, with the result that that the portal has never been expanded beyond the bare minimum size, and many of its content forked-sub-pages have rotted. We a do a grave disservice to our readers when we lure them away from the B-class head article Nintendo (with its fine collection of navboxes) to a neglected portal. The fact that in this case, the portal has above average pageviews only makes the situation worse, because that means more time being wasted.

I also share the nominator's alarm about this being a single-company portal. As such it cannot avoid becoming a showcase for that company, to the exclusion of its competitors. No matter how diligently any editor of this portal strives to uphold WP:NPOV, the scope makes it is structurally impossible to avoid the portal becoming a breach of WP:PROMO.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

However, this is not a "broad topic". It's a relatively narrow topic, but covered in copious detail because of the systemic bias of Wikipedia editors towards a set of topics which includes video games. It only is a single company, and more than an order of magnitude smaller than the world's biggest companies. Nintendo's annual revenue of ~US$10billion is indeed large, but still way behind the world's biggest companies such as Royal Dutch Shell (US$388 billion), Apple Inc (US$266 billion), Toyota (US$272 billion), China National Petroleum Corporation ($262 billion). Exxon Mobil, Volkswagen and Berkshire Hathaway also exceed $200 billion of annual revenue.

Since the problems here are structural, I also oppose re-creation. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:25, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. See Izno, basically. I am of the opinion that the vast majority of Portals should be deleted, so I wouldn't be torn up about this one being gone, but if at least some portals were kept, this is actually not a bad one to keep, since it has more pageviews than average, indicating that at least some readers care (the key problem that 99% of Portals have). "Revenue of corporations" is a very weak indicator of societal interest / merit; Emily Dickinson wasn't paid a dime for her works, yet they're far more studied than whatever powered the 1850s Massachusetts economy (agriculture? whaling?) these days, etc. SnowFire (talk) 23:04, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I've linked to this portal often, but I frankly don't see the purpose in maintaining it or I would volunteer to do so myself. As for policy argument, the points about low readership resonate the most with me; less so the arguments about topic coverage. (not watching, please {{ping}}) czar 00:56, 29 September 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.