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. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 08:34, 26 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:British Army

Portal:British Army ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Stillborn portal. Out of 10 selected articles, 10 units, 10 bios and 10 selected equipment, only Portal:British Army/Selected unit/4 has been added to since 2008. Mark Schierbecker ( talk) 04:01, 19 August 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for over a decade (save one very limited update in 2010) and never caught on. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had over a decade of no maintainers and it had a very low 18 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article British Army had 2073 views per day in the same period). The head article has also been accessed at GA status and has a very useful and versatile set of navboxes, making this portal a failed solution in search of a problem. 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 over a decade of hard evidence shows the British Army is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 ( talk) 16:51, 19 August 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete it is indeed about a broad subject--a major army over many centuries. It gets about 7000 clocks a year so thousands of people actually use it. Rjensen ( talk) 02:17, 21 August 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Rjensen There are very specific broadness measurements and other criteria in the not-optional WP:POG guideline. WP:POG states portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." No guess work is needed. Hundreds of similar abandoned portals have been deleted at MfD in the past six months, such as Portal:United States Army, Portal:United States Navy, Portal:Ottoman Empire, and Portal:Armenia. Over a decade of hard data shows few readers and no maintainers want this narrow portal (being broad in a literal sense or interesting mean nothing here). The GA-Class head article British Army and its set of versatile navboxes are far more useful to readers than this long abandoned junk portal. Newshunter12 ( talk) 08:37, 22 August 2019 (UTC) reply

OK thanks---i agree. Rjensen ( talk) 11:53, 22 August 2019 (UTC) reply

@ Rjensen Glad we agree, but does that mean you will change your vote to delete this abandoned portal? Newshunter12 ( talk) 17:36, 22 August 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete - The country portal is everything editors need to work on all topics related to this. There is no need for numerous narrow subportals with obsolete content. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 18:15, 21 August 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete per nom. Buckshot06 (talk) 18:25, 23 August 2019 (UTC) reply
• Comment - Biography 10, of John Moore (British Army officer), contains an error in the year of his death. It is correct in the article about him. Further review shows that the date of his death, in battle, was always correct in the article, and was correct in the subpage until 19 August 2009, when it was changed by an IP from 1809 to 1806, a sort of sneaky vandalism that is very difficult to detect. Subpages are very seldom watchlisted, and the error is not obvious, still during the Napoleonic Wars. Correcting the error ten years later would be waving a dead rat. The rat has been there for ten years, and the vandal may have made subtle changes to other dates in other portals. The problem is that forked subpages are a rat-house. Robert McClenon ( talk) 22:18, 24 August 2019 (UTC) reply

Three Military Portals

The following table shows statistics for three recently nominated military portals.

Continued Discussion of British Army

• Comment - I've killed the rat. The use of forked subpages is a rat-house and needs to be torn down. Robert McClenon ( talk) 23:35, 24 August 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete – A combination of low readership and of far too little maintenance over a period of years. There is no short-term reason to expect that a re-creation of this portal will address the problems. Any proposed re-creation of this portal using a more modern design, and taking into account the failures of many portals, can go to Deletion Review.

Robert McClenon ( talk) 23:35, 24 August 2019 (UTC) reply

• Note to closing admin. If you close this 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:United Kingdom), without creating duplicate entries. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 22:14, 25 August 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.