Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Beijing

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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. — xaosflux  Talk 23:22, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Beijing


Abandoned mini-portal on Beijing, the capital of China. A selection of pictures, but no list of articles and no rotation of content.

Created in October 2012‎.

Converted in September 2018‎ by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to an automated clone of the navbox Template:Beijing. That made it just a bloated redundant fork of the navbox. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).

In April 2019, it was reverted to a non-automated format.

The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Beijing looks healthy at first glance, but most of the content pages are empty:
 * Portal:Beijing/Did you know/1. same topic (Beijing city fortifications) since its creation in 2014
 * ... but Portal:Beijing/Selected article/2, /3, /4 and /3 have all been blank since their creation
 * Portal:Beijing/Selected picture/1, /2, /3, /4, /5 are all unchanged since their creation in 2014
 * ... but Portal:Beijing/Selected picture/6, /7, /8, /9 and /10 have all been empty since their creation in 2014.
 * Portal:Beijing/Did you know/1, /2 and /3 have displayed their one item each without change since 2014. Per 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 these 5-year-old lack the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * ... and Portal:Beijing/Did you know/4 and Portal:Beijing/Did you know/5 have been blank since their creation in 2014.

WP:POG says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed over 80 consecutive updates.

In theory, Beijing is a broad topic. Big capital city of huge country, very long history, good coverage. But in practice, it has not met the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 15 pageviews per day, slightly more than the abysmal median of 13 per day for all portals, but still under 0.4% of the 3,754 daily views of the head article. And it has consistently failed to attract maintainers.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Beijing and its navbox Template:Beijing.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox offers 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:Beijing.
 * 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 the article Beijing.

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

That sets a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". It would take a lot of work to make a portal which genuinely offers more than the head article Beijing with its navbox Beijing.

But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and a team of editors to maintain it ... so I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:07, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - As per analysis by BHG. But even if someone finds a way to make a better portal, will the interested readers come?  They don't come to any city portal, yet.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:53, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: portals require maintenance, if a topic doesn't attract maintainers then either it's too narrow or people just aren't interested in portals anymore.   SITH   (talk)   11:38, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - as bad as the previous one. Pldx1 (talk) 14:04, 25 May 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.