Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:American Old West

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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 discussion was:  delete. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:35, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:American Old West


Static micro-portal on the American frontier, abandoned since its 2017 creation with one selected article, one selected picture, and a page of 3 fake DYKs.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This fails on at least two counts:
 * 1) Narrow topic . I'm not sure how to assess the theoretical breadth of this topic.
 * 2) Low readership .  The portal's daily average of only 13 views per day is trivially low.
 * 3) Lack of maitainers . After two years, nobody has ever bothered to give this portal any selection of topics.

Created on 16 April 2017‎ by, whose last contribution to the portal was the following day, whose last contribution to the portal was 3 hours and 7 minutes later, in the early hours of the 17th. Since 2006, the lead of WP:POG   has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Drown Soda. Sadly, it has also been neither maintained nor developed by anyone else, and remains little more than a foundation.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:American Old West shows a slim set of neglected sub-pages:
 * Portal:American Old West/Did you know, with 3 items: Fort Nez Percés, John Jacob Astor and Black Hills. None of them has ever been listed at WP:DYK, which means they were not subject to the scrutiny and verification processs of WP:DYK. WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this isn't s showcase of new content. It's just a trivia section.
 * Portal:American Old West/Selected articles/1, which was sensibly converted in 2018 to use Transclude lead excerpt, so it is no longer a content fork.
 * Portal:American Old West/Selected pictures/1, which has displayed the same picture since its creation.
 * There are also some other pages, unused in the portal: Portal:American Old West/Selected picture/1, Portal:American Old West/Selected picture/2, Portal:American Old West/Selected pictures/2, Portal:American Old West/Selected articles/6. They all appear to be copies of the pages in use.
 * Portal:American Old West/American Old West topics, a list of 49 topics.

So there is no rotation of content. The one actually useful part of the portal is Portal:American Old West/American Old West topics. However, that page is redundant to Template:American frontier, with which it has 80% overlap.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers nearly all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. 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 the 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:American frontier, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it only on any link in the head article American frontier.
 * 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 this link to the article American frontier, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of 50 images.  It's a vastly better show than lone image in the portal.

So, like far too many other portals, this barely-started relic is a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:59, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Not a good start. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 04:19, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator,  Brown HairedGirl . Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to abandoned junk, and was just a fan creation. I oppose re-creation, as two years of hard evidence shows the American Old West is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:33, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per User:BrownHairedGirl. This portal is even more incomplete than most incomplete portals.  BHG says that the topic list is the best part (of not much), but the topic list has errors.  For instance, Calamity Jane was never an outlaw.   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) 21:52, 20 August 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.