Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Current events subportals

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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 debate was obviously no consensus to delete as far as I can tell, so defaulting to keep Yamamoto Ichiro 会話 08:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Current events subportals

I am nominating a slew of the subportals of Current Events. My reasons are as follows:

  • Most of them are totally inactive. Europe, India, Israel, Latin America, Middle East, Poland and Turkey all had less than 50 edits for the past year; Africa, Canada, United States less than 100 and many of these are edits are either vandalism, or multiple edits on single entries
  • Many of these were maintained by region portals, that now use the User:Wikinews Importer Bot
  • Relatively few people ever reach the subportals as far as I can gather. Little activity on news pages, little activity in editing. People seem to prefer their own language wikipedia CE, and interest in CE from Wikipedia even on the "World" level seems to have been dwindling since late August
  • The pages are not archived very well by their maintainers.
  • The pages prentend to be "current", but they are not. As such "historic" pages like "2008 in Africa" are much more suitable for editing in this relation and much more helpful for Wikipedia.

That leaves what to do next. I'm suggestion redirecting them to "currentyear in region". Deletion does not seem necessary to me. Alternatively we can mark them as Historic/Inactive and point people at alternative "venues". Also, when discussing this remember that to some degree CE is part of the navigational structure of Wikipedia as much, or perhaps even more as that it is part of article content. If it doesn't help people in updating articles in the area of the current events subject, then its not really fulfilling its purpose.

We are left with the subportals: Sports (a good subportal that is quite active), Science and technology (potential, but seems to be dwindling as well recently), South East Asia (well managed atm by its region portal atm it seems). We could discuss potentially just redirecting to the Portals of that subject instead, but i'm not really sure if that is a good idea.

So to summarize: I think that redirects to "currentyear in topic" will be more useful than our current system of badly and inconsistently maintained subportals --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:24, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Comment: In principle I have no objection to what TheDJ (talk · contribs) has proposed, but what about finding some way to incorporate using User:Wikinews Importer Bot into this solution, perhaps by using a similar tactic at "currentyear in region" that is now being used at Deaths in 2008? Cirt (talk) 21:59, 13 January 2008 (UTC).
    • I think that that should best be left up to the "regional portals" in terms of implementation. I think the best thing we can focus on atm right here, is where do we redirect the pages to. "year in region" or "portal:region#news", supposing people agree that the current format for these should be discontinued. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:01, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment: I see no reason to delete pages ever. People link to these pages and reference this page in articles. I would suggest either leaving them be or helping to link them better from the current events page to get them visibility.
  • Delete, or Redirect to related Wikinews portals, or import Wikinews data, depending on what's most feasible. That is, I agree with the nomination - the parallel Wikinews portals are maintained better by far. PKT (talk) 23:13, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Redirect to "current year in topic", and delete if no such suitable page exists. I maintained the Oceania current events page up until the beginning of 2007. Up until that time it was one of the more active such pages, but I was almost the only person maintaining it, and I decided other activities were a higher priority. I had wondered if an active editor (or perhaps even a bot) regularly copying stories from the main current events page to the subpages might help to invigorate them, but some solution using the Wikinews importer bot makes more sense.-gadfium 04:13, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Import using User:Wikinews Importer Bot. I think this would be a great way to strengthen the collaborations between the two projects. If "Topics in the new" is of interest for particular projects, then they can add another subsection at their portals. Examples of this blended approach are at Portal:Current events, Portal:Science and Portal:Sports and games. RichardF (talk) 21:39, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
    • I was wondering how you think "importing" will help make the portals more visited and better maintained ? I think it will only make people even more "lazy" in updating the subportals, and in that case we could just as well redirect them to that particular wikinews regional portal right? What are your views on that? --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:23, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
      • I just looked at one example, but I think it's probably representative. Portal:United States/News is the source page that updates Portal:Current events/United States and Portal:United States. Personally, I consider it to be a good thing to be able to get to the same information from multiple routes. Some people will start with Current events, some will start with The United States. Let the people decide. The bot can update the subpage shared by both portals. This approach can be used for the other country/region portals as well. RichardF (talk) 23:42, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
        • Ah ok, so you want to share the same content page with 2 interface pages. I'm not a big fan of such things, i prefer K.I.S.S. I'd personally rather have redirects to regional portals News sections almost all of which already seem to be using wikinews importer bot. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:02, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
          • I understand. I prefer to stay where I thought I was going and benefit from the power of transclusion. What would Wikipedia be without it?! ;-) RichardF (talk) 00:15, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Second the Import idea. - Agree w/ RichardF (talk · contribs), who is very experienced in this sort of thing. Cirt (talk) 22:02, 15 January 2008 (UTC).
  • Boy, I knew this was coming. I also support Richard F.'s proposal, as long as each sub-portal has the support from Wikinews. - Mtmelendez (Talk) 14:17, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
RichardF (talk) 16:47, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Second the Import idea too Muhammad(talk) 19:03, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment I'm feeling my original points are badly addressed in this discussion. I fear these subportals are now gonna turn into a "commercial for wikinews" instead of being "Current events" portals. Current events != news reported by Wikinews. CE is supposed to be a vehicle that assists editors in creating and editing articles that are in the news by way of linking to these articles. Wikinews does NOT do this it links to headlines on wikinews. If the wikinews importer bot fans (aka wikinewsies) want to promote their bot, they should approach regional portals in my opinion. Individual portals are also welcome to maintain a Current events page that includes both wikinews and edited CE. That was not the point of my MfD however. The point was that the Current events subportals are not being maintained, and as such should be redirected to something more useful within Wikipedia. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:18, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Move/Redirect We could try keeping a CE portal for each continent and redirecting the country ones to their continent, it isn't only poeple ho live a continent who want to find out what is happening there. With fewer subportals there would be less to maintain and so probably more activity on each, and they would be kept more up to date. Harland1 (t/c) 14:47, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment: A good idea in theory, but I'm not really so sure, what with the licences and everything else. WP is GFDL, Wikinews cc-by. Last I heard, they're incompatible. --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 23:55, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Second the import idea, per the users above.Bless sins (talk) 23:51, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
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.