Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Abandoned micro-portals for Australian state capitals

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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. MER-C 20:14, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Abandoned micro-portals for Australian state capitals


These 5 portals are examples of a common phenomenon: manual portals, on arguably broad-ish topics (all big cities), not broken, but abandoned as micro-portals. They fall way below the minimum standards in several respects, and are redundant to their respective head articles and their respective state portals. Each of them started out as a redirect in 2006; all of them have history of poor-quality portals being built, abandoned and then redirected again. The current portals mostly date from work in 2017 by.

WP:PORTAL says that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". Portals are not content. They are tools to help readers navigate a topic and to showcase some of its best and/or most significant article ... so unless they are actually currently fulfilling that goal of actually offering an enhanced experience, we shouldn't lure readers away from article space with a promise of enhancement which just leaves them disillusioned with the whole notion of a portal. And given the long history of these portals oscillating between redirect and abandoned portal, the eventualist approach is like Waiting for Godot. In recent weeks, hundreds of abandoned portals have been deleted: the consensus is that waiting for Godot is not a wise strategy. Just as undersized categories are routinely deleted at WP:CFD per WP:SMALLCAT, under-sized portals are now routinely deleted at MFD.

Meanwhile, two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that a topic's head article and its navboxes offers most of the functionality which portals like this set out to offer, and does some of the job much better than a portal. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and then select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
 * 1) mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead.  So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links.  Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Adelaide landmarks, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * 2) automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.   Try it by right-clicking on any of these links to the article Adelaide... then open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But these portals fail the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game:
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but these portals have abysmal page views, and have a long history of being unmaintained
 * WP:POG requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But one of these has only 2 article, three have 4 articles, and one has eight. Even the best manages only 40% of the minimum.


 * Notes

I usually propose that abandoned portals be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to re-creation. But given these portals' long history of a cycle of re-creation and abandonment, I think it's better to just delete these portals and all their sub-pages. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 11:53, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Discussion (abandoned portals for Australian state capitals)

 * add your keep/delete/merge/comment here


 * Delete. They read as promotion for tourism.  Not compatible with being encyclopedic content.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:01, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I concur with the analysis by BHG, and note:
 * None of the portals comes close to satisfying the portal guideline of 20 articles.
 * None of the portals has as much as 0.5% of the pageviews of the head article.
 * Since none of the portals has been updated in the past year, none of them is likely to do any better in the near future.  Robert McClenon (talk) 12:54, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete – In the absence of criteria WP: POG for cities and the exclusion of the parent portal Portal:Cities I understand that a portal about only one city is not a broad topic.Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:09, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: per BHG's and Robert's analyses. Also echo SmokeyJoe's concerns, these smack of WP:NOTTRAVEL material.    SITH   (talk)   15:56, 7 June 2019 (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.