Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alternative rock

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| [gab] || 18:09, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Alternative rock (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Delete Not a sufficiently broad topic for a portal; can be more than adequately covered by Portal:Rock music. Since we don't have any guideline to guide us any more, I guess the fact that no editors edit this portal is irrelevant now? Or something? UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:31, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - 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, although the advocates of portals do not display common sense, at least not what the philosophers of the Roman Empire or Scottish Enlightenment would recognize. A portal that is not much viewed and is not much maintained does not appear to have a common-sensical use. This portal has an average of 21 daily pageviews in the second half of 2019, as opposed to 1855 for the head article.
• Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Alternative rock shows 20 selected albums, 25 selected articles, 17 selected pictures, 5 DYKs, and other pages. A spot-check of less than all of the articles shows that the articles checked were all content-forked in 2007, and that there was a page move in 2011 due to a portal renaming, and that there was a stylistic edit in 2018. Some were tweaked between 2011 and 2018, mostly in 2013 or 2015. There appears to have been no substantive change to the articles, although alternative rock is a continuing genre and is evolving, and the content of the articles appears to be the same as when it was content-forked in 2007, although the original articles are evolving, allowing content-rot, which shows that the use of subpages is a flawed design. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:15, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nom. The topic is too narrow for a portal.--Darwinek (talk) 13:22, 28 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:Rock music), without creating duplicate entries. --
• Delete - An unmaintained portal with little viewing. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:28, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per Robert McClenon's comment above. Also, the lack of a portal guideline cuts both ways - it doesn't mean portals are to be kept by default. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:30, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nominator and Robert McClenon. This woefully under-maintained portal (almost abandoned) is a waste of the time of every reader who is unfortunate enough to be lured to this set of decade-old content forks. The GA-class head article Alternative rock, with its navbox Template:Alternative rock, does a vastly superior job of the two key portals functions of navigation and showcasing. Readers should not be lured away from high-quality articles to abandoned junk like this.

As other editors have note, WP:POG has been downgraded to an information page. That means that there is no longer any policy or guideline supporting the Rube Goldberg machine model of portals which seek to display excerpts of articles, whether by content-forking (as in this case) or by automated excerpt (as per some updated portals). Instead, as @Robert McClenon rightly notes, editors should use common sense ... and the common sense response to this portal is to recognise it as as a failed solution to a non-problem. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:14, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge and redirect to Portal:Rock music. bd2412 T 13:25, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• @BD2412: I strongly oppose both merger and redirection:

1. Merger just means preserving a set outdated of content forks, which is a very bad idea.
2. Redirection means that portals links will display a link to a portal which doesn't exist, and then surprise the reader by opening up a portal on a broader topic. Nearly all such redirects have been deleted at RFD for just that reason. It's much better to simply replace the links, as I proposed above. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:06, 1 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.