Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Berlin

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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:  Moved to Project Space. There is a consensus to delete (so I will be deleting the redirect), however there seems to be no objection to the move to project space, so this may be closed. Barkeep49 (talk) 22:24, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Berlin

 * – (View MfD)

This portal may have been well-maintained in the past (unlike most portals nominated here), but nowadays...not so much. A rather unfortunate failing of WP:POG. ToThAc (talk) 20:51, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Twelve selected articles; one is C-class, one is B-class, and the remaining ten are Start-class.
 * Though well-maintained by the creator for quite a while, their edits to the portal suddenly fell off a cliff to abysmal levels after nearly three years, with only one edit to the portal in 2018 and none in 2019. The only other maintainer made a flood of edits in early December 2011 (just before the creator stopped editing the portal), and hasn't been active since August 2018.
 * Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 11 for the portal versus 4252 for the parent article, or .2587%.
 * Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks?  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Germany), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:20, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the nom. Some parts of this portal have been abandoned for over two years and others for nearly eight, and it is six articles short of POG's minimum of 20. Since late 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 Bermicourt, who has sporadically maintained it after creation, and has only made one tiny edit in over two years. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This portal has had nearly eight years of no steady maintainers and it had a very low 11 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article Berlin had 4,252 views per day in the same period).
 * POG also states portals should be associated with a wikiproject, but while WikiProject Germany is active, the portal is not mentioned on the main page (save an auto-MfD notice) and the only mention ever of the portal on the talk page was the creation announcement and request for help in 2011, which got no response. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as nearly eight years of hard evidence shows Berlin is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or (lasting) maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 11:44, 12 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep. Berlin is one of the major world capitals and one of Germany's federal states, so easily qualifies as a broad topic. It has not been abandoned - I have simply paused working on portals while there has been a mass creation followed by the mass deletion of portals over the last couple of years - waiting for a rationale consensus before moving forward. Portals are not articles - they are navigation aids like categories, they are also important project tools to enable an overview of the coverage of a topic and the work needed to enhance and improve it. For example, editors could create a hundred new articles based on the gaps shown in the portal and a hundred more might be improved. Yet you would never pick that up by merely looking at portal views or portal edits. Most of the other criticisms are easily fixed - the reason the number of showcased articles is twelve is to fit a monthly cycle - twenty has never been a go/no go criterion for a portal - WP:POG calls it a "rough guide". The portal is now also linked from the main project page, so that issue has been fixed. Bermicourt (talk) 13:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Per my arguments here and here I understant that cities portals not meets WP:POG, like biografies portals and second level countries divisions portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:27, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, and oppose re-creation. Narrow topic + low readership + poor maintenance = clear fail of 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". The comments above by @Bermicourt that It has not been abandoned - I have simply paused working on portals is clear evidence of the problem: the portal has not attracted the multiple maintainers required by POG, and is wholly dependent on the efforts of one editor.
 * As noted by @Guilherme Burn, the experience of the last six months of MFD is that it is exceptionally rare for any city to be a broad enough topic to make a viable portal. Portal enthusiasts have repeatedly massively underestimated the breadth of topic required to make a viable portal. That's why over 800 of the 1500 pre-portalspam portals have been deleted in the last 6 months.  Portal enthusiasts need to concentrate their efforts on way fewer, better portals rather than trying to defend the abysmally failed practice of trying to maximise the number of portals.  Berlin is only a Level-4 vital topic. i,e. in the 1,000–10,000 rage of priorities.  With the number of portals now closer to 500 than to 1000, Berlin simply isn't significant enough.
 * I admire Bermicourt's work in creating what @Britishfinance called the "mega-navbox" style of portal, but sadly it hasn't proved to be any more attractive to readers than the failed excerpt model. However, the lists here may well be useful to editors, so I would support moving them to project space so that editors can continue to make use of them. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:31, 12 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete and oppose re-creation – Cities, federal states, and I think even countries, tend not to be good topics for portals. As I see it, the "broadness" criteria is linked to the "readership" and "maintainers" criteria: a portal has to be sufficiently broad in order to attract enough readers and maintainers to keep the quality up. This portal–like every city portal I've seen so far–isn't broad enough to attract enough readers and maintainers. You can see it in the lack of feature content and in all the red-links: there just isn't enough content about Berlin being created to assemble into a portal. Some may argue that this is a "chicken-and-the-egg" problem: that the portal encourages editors to create quality content, so therefore if we delete the portal, we'll be counterproductively discouraging the creation of quality content. I think, however, this argument has been disproven: this portal was created in 2009. Clearly, creating a portal without enough content does not encourage the creation of the missing content. My final thought is one I keep having about the remaining portals: the article Berlin is B-class. This is a world-class city, it should have a Feature-class article. In my opinion, every editor hour spent on the portal is better spent on the article. – Levivich 21:00, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * This is an interesting but somewhat incomplete portal, closer to a pretty Outline (but we don't have Outline of Berlin) than to most other portals. It is clear that a city like Berlin is a very broad topic area, but maybe easier to make a focussed portal about than about a whole country (where selected articles tend to be a bit more random). As a point of order, I do not think the first MfD on a page can prejudice the re-creation of a different page under the same title, so any such votes should be discounted as outside of MfD's remit. A re-creation has to pass WP:CSD, not additional criteria not set out in policy. I support a move of the lists of red links (which include the useful information about article quality in the German Wikipedia) to suitable subpages of the Germany portal or wikiproject, and oppose outright deletion. —Kusma (t·c) 09:38, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Eight Great Cities

 * Portals compete in a different league from articles, so the comparison is not very useful. Portal:London does have twice as many page views as Outline of London does |Portal:London, and Portal:New York City has six times more than Outline of New York City, see |Portal:New_York_City. —Kusma (t·c) 09:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
 * What, User:Kusma? The point of the comparison is that portals seldom have even 1% of the readership of articles.  This table permits any of a comparison of portals against other portals, a comparison of articles against other articles, or a comparison of portals against articles.  You can attach what importance you wish to the ratio of article views and portal views.  Some editors find it interesting.  If you don't, you can ignore it.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:03, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
 * If you are suggesting that Outlines be deleted because they are useless, that is likely a good idea. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:03, 19 September 2019 (UTC)comments

Discussion of Berlin

 * Neutral at this time - This portal is much better than Portal:Paris. Some of the criticisms are not accurate.  It is stated that the portal has had very little maintenance in several years.  Maintenance to a portal doesn't always have to be maintenance to the portal page.  The portal has an article-of-the-month plan that was implemented in 2017, or at least the articles were put in in 2017. That is maintenance.  I agree that the pageviews are poor.  I agree that creating a portal in order to get improved article coverage is not effective, and results in neither good portals nor good articles.  But nominators of portals for deletion, and portal critics, should at least have their facts straight.  The portal has been maintained more recently than the nomination says.  Robert McClenon (talk)

Move to project space

 * I've moved the portal to project space to avoid wasting any more time and to enable it to continue to be used by project editors to develop and improve the coverage of Berlin city and state. I would appreciate help cleaning up links and so forth. Bermicourt (talk) 18:26, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Bermicourt, thanks for moving it. I will happily remove the links as soon the discussion is closed. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:56, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per similar votes above. Now with the recent move, we have links in article space taking people to Wikipedia space, a WikiProject. That isn't right. I'm sympathetic that this is one is useful by pointing out red-linked potential articles and the like, and the solution to that is to import that information into a WikiProject page. But this portal should go, not pulling in readers from article space, and not incubating for future revival. -Crossroads- (talk) 19:32, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Closure. Since the portal has been moved to project space, this discussion is now moot.   I have left a request at WP:ANRGFC. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:04, 24 September 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.