Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris

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: redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents. (non-admin closure) ToadetteEdit (talk) 17:25, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris

These four wikiprojects on US presidential candidates were all created by Another Believer without following the recommended proposal process and none of them ever became active. He was advised that this was likely a waste of time after creating WikiProject Joe Biden four years ago but chose to ignore it. They are all redundant to WikiProject United States Presidents which is active and has existed for nearly twenty years. – Joe (talk) 15:02, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Keep all. Unnecessary nomination. The process for creating new WikiProjects is recommended, not required, and the older WikiProjects have talk page discussions and archives that should be kept. If you don't want to join WikiProject Kamala Harris, then don't, but I don't understand the crusade to delete multiple WikiProjects outright. Inactive projects can be merged and/or archived. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:09, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The process is optional but the underlying logic—that you should find out whether anyone wants to work with you on new wikiproject before you spin up a whole set of project pages and categories that will need to be maintained indefinitely—has proven to be sound advice time and time again. I would have proposed merging them into WP US Presidents if they had ever been active, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Can you point to any significant talk page discussions that are worth archiving? – Joe (talk) 15:16, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't feel a need to comment further. Happy editing, ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:19, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I am not involved in any of the Wikiprojects, I just saw them in the Women In Red talk page, and I do not plan to get involved as these topics stress me out; but I do not think that they are necessarily redundant to WikiProject United States Presidents as that page covers all USA presidents over nearly 240 years, whilst these 4 are extremely recent and hence will probably have more coverage and articles. Additionally, many of these will have others article unrelated to presidency (e.g. Donald Trump's various crimes). I also believe that discussing these on the relevant WikiProjects for all 5 of them would be a better idea than nominating for deletion. DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk) 15:41, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As a point of comparison the only other wikiprojects that cover the leaders of a specific country are WikiProject Sinhalese Monarchy (defunct for a decade) and WikiProject British Royalty (active). There are no wikiprojects devoted to one specific politician apart from these four and WikiProject Barack Obama (also inactive). Of course where you draw the line in determining wikiproject scopes is arbitrary, but the evidence that individual US presidents/presidential candidates are not viable topics of independent wikiprojects is that the oldest was created in 2009 and none have ever been active. – Joe (talk) 16:07, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I generally don't think we need individual projects with 100 or so articles to them. I said so last night when I saw AB make the KHive project. Delete Kamala as its brand new. But I'm inclined to keep the others because Wikipedia:WikiProject#Inactive projects says These projects are retained for reference as they may be viable because they provide topic-specific considerations of the many site-wide policies and guidelines that still apply to a subset of articles. And I advise using the recommended protocol for project formation in the future. – Muboshgu (talk) 18:36, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to WikiProject United States Presidents. The fact that Biden, Kamala Harris and Trump WikiProjects are all super active topics, while Clinton and Obama...less so, is a good sign that a shared WikiProject would be beneficial. If someone learns something by accident about Warren G. Harding or James Buchanan they will survive. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:55, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to WikiProject United States Presidents per Shushugah. There isn't enough activity around all US Presidents to prevent articles about these four from getting the attention they need from the wider WikiProject. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:14, 22 July 2024 (UTC) (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to WP:USP (or WP:USPE) per @Shushugah and @Ahecht. 00101984hjw (talk) 23:11, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge as taskforces of WPUSPRES? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:36, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Also Harris should be treated like any other US politician unless actually elected. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:24, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents states it covers Vice Presidents, so Harris already falls under its self-assigned scope. (So do spouses.) CMD (talk) 02:26, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I personally would favor this OR what I said below (make all of these into their own task forces). Historyday01 (talk) 19:08, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents. In addition to the activity considerations mentioned above, it seems beneficial to group conversations in an area not framed around a single individual. A visual indicator of writing in the broader encyclopaeidic context, and possibly also avoiding recentism. CMD (talk) 01:45, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I don't have a hard view at this point on whether to keep these or not, but I do think that if the result is "Delete" or "Redirect", it should be a soft redirect from their respective front pages, with each project marked "inactive" and perhaps all their project pages tagged with {{historical}}. I can't fathom why we would want to destroy this work or make it too hard to find, particularly in cases where the WikiProjects have been around for years. Also, perhaps their members/participants should be informed. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 02:18, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are no actual participants and no work to archive. They aren't former groups of editors that went active; just pages that AB creates every four years then abandons. That's why they are at MfD rather than the usual discussion about merging inactive projects. – Joe (talk) 06:13, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I see a lot of listed participants in the Joe Biden WP, for example, and even though I'm not listed, I did cleanups of their listed articles recently. I don't see a hard reason to make them disappear. Mothballing is within reason, though. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 06:43, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Were you working from information at that Wikiproject page? If so, what were you working from? I've raised a note in another MfD about the potential use of tools such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Joe Biden articles by quality statistics. The Wikiproject doesn't seem to have done much editor-wise, no post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Joe Biden has received a reply since 2020, so if some other aspect of the Wikiproject was separately useful that's a helpful anecdote. CMD (talk) 07:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I built my AWB run list from Category:WikiProject Joe Biden articles. I found this through Category:WikiProject Joe Biden shown at the bottom of that project's front page. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 07:11, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! That's coming from the Wikiproject template I believe, same as the quality statistics. Best, CMD (talk) 07:23, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, per WP:AGF and common sense, these WikiProjects seem to have a serious purpose. Just because the creator maybe didn't stick around doesn't mean others didn't take them seriously. I'd go by the rule of thumb of whether the projects received significant action or not. If they did, mothball them with a soft redirect. If very little or nothing, then delete/redirect. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 06:56, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Totally agree, I'd just put these in the "little or nothing" category. Putting your name on a list takes five seconds. I don't consider that a sign of life. – Joe (talk) 07:23, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Something: it seems unnecessary to have these as separate WikiProjects in their own right (since nobody really participates in them as such) but it does seem useful to have these categories for the sort of bizarre twilight-zone thing we actually use WikiProjects for, which is tracking edits to groups of related pages, making lists with User:HotArticlesBot, sorting stuff like {{expert}} templates, et cetera. At the very least, for actively campaigning candidates or sitting presidents I think it does; I don't know how much it makes sense to have a super-narrow categorization like this for Hillary or Obama or W. But if you look at, for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Donald_Trump#Article_alerts you can actually see a pretty decent slice of articles broadly related to Trump and his administration (I'm not sure why Wikipedia:WikiProject_Joe_Biden doesn't have the same thing, but you get the idea). jp×g 🗯️ 11:05, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. What about making "Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris", "Wikipedia:WikiProject Joe Biden", "Wikipedia:WikiProject Donald Trump" and "Wikipedia:WikiProject Hillary Clinton" into task forces or something like that? Historyday01 (talk) 19:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The issue there is that since these are dead wikiprojects they'll just end up being dead taskforces. I understand that residual tools like Wikipedia:WikiProject Donald Trump#Article alerts can be useful but the point of wikiprojects and task forces is to assemble a group of editors, not categories. And of course without the editors to maintain the categories, those will also slowly decay. What I think we should be exploring instead is whether tools like article alerts can be adapted to work with mainspace category trees, which are maintained. – Joe (talk) 19:19, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, more or less. The whole WikiProject framework seems kind of bizarre and arseways for about 99% of them -- we have a few (milhist, vidya, storms) that actually involve active coordination between editors, and then about nine million like Theme songs, Animals in media, Limnology and Oceanography, Islands, etc where it's not really clear what it means to be a member or participate in them, and they just kind of exist for the sake of being an ad-hoc categorization system. For a while I have dreamed of doing something about this but I don't really know what it would be. jp×g 🗯️ 09:09, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@JPxG: If you're not already, watchlist WT:COUNCIL for ongoing discussions along similar lines :) – Joe (talk) 09:39, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. That's a good point. I'd support redirecting them to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents as other users have proposed. Historyday01 (talk) 15:30, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@JPxG, we don't need these pages to achieve that goal. For any use that would have relied on Category:WikiProject Joe Biden articles, we can use Category:Joe Biden instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:59, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that redirecting all of these to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents would be the best outcome, and while I did appreciate his creation of Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 in 2020, I ask User:Another Believer to avoid creating WikiProject pages in the future unless and until he has an actual social group in place. A WP:WikiProject is a group of editors – not a collection of pages, a subject area, or a categorization scheme. The pages, templates, and categories should not be created unless and until there is a real group of editors ready to use them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:04, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect and Merge to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents. A check of the viewing of their talk pages shows that, except for Trump, they have an average of zero (that is, less than 0.5) pageviews daily, and Trump (a polarizing figure) has 1 pageview daily. Mostly they are just sitting there. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:19, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents. The whole point of WikiProjects is having a centralized place to coordinate, and splitting them up defeats this purpose. I'd also be interested if anyone thinks it's worth having a more general discussion about getting smaller WikiProjects merged with their "parent" projects so they can be more useful. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:50, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect all to Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Presidents. Bizarre choice of projects to create. SerialNumber54129 11:22, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris (abortive WikiProject); redirect the rest to the suggested target per the above discussion.—Alalch E. 16:05, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect/merge I think having entire projects for individuals (with a few exceptions) is generally a poor idea (especially politicians). The only one I think might have been able to support itself is the Donald Trump project (since he has a very dedicated fanbase/following) but if it's true that none of them (including the Trump one) has ever been active then I don't see any reason to keep.★Trekker (talk) 15:14, 7 August 2024 (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.