Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Calgary

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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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 04:08, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Calgary


Low-pageview micro-portal on the Canadian city of Calgary, in Alberta. With just two articles, two biogs, 4 pictures and a lone fake DYK, it never really got off the ground, and it has been abandoned since shortly after its creation in 2013.

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 one is a fail on at last two of those criteria:
 * 1) Narrow topic .  Cities with populations of less than a million rarely sustain a portal with viable numbers of readers and editors. Calgary's 2018 population of 1.27 million is barely above that level.
 * 2) Low readership . In January–June 2019, the portal got only a pathetic average of  9 pageviews per day.  That's a small decline on the 2015–19 daily average of 11 pageviews per day.
 * 3) No maintainers .  Ths portal is almost untouched since 2013, the year of its creation. Details below.

Created on 29 August 2013‎, who has made a total of less than 450 edits to Wikipedia. Calerusnak's last edit to this portal was on 30 August 2013, the day after its creation. Since 2006, the lead of WP:POG says "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create", but that has not happened here. And the portal has not been maintained by anyone else.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Calgary shows a small set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Calgary/Selected article/1, untouched since August 2013; and Portal:Calgary/Selected article/2, whose image was replaced in 2015.
 * Portal:Calgary/Selected biography/1 and /2, both untouched since August 2013.
 * Portal:Calgary/Did you know, also untouched since August 2013. It's line item 2013 Alberta floods, has never been part of WP:DYK. This a fake DYK section; it's just outdated WP:TRIVIA.
 * Portal:Calgary/Selected picture/1, /2 and /3, all untouched since 2013; and Portal:Calgary/Selected picture/4, whose image was changed since 2015.
 * Portal:Calgary/Opentask, whose purpose is unclear, since it is unchanged since 2013 as a bulleted list of 12 links to articles, with no indication of what the task might be.

This is all redundant to the B-class head article Calgary. Its collection of navboxes provides better navigation than the abandoned portal, and its summary-style construction provides better showcasing.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes 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 either  of these links to Calgary and Calgary neighbourhoods, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it only on any link in the head article Calgary.
 * 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 Calgary, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of over 20 images.  It's a vastly better image gallery than the portal.

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 this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value this portal might have had it 2013, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:51, 18 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 never even got off the ground to begin with. The portal was born and died in the blink of an eye, only its corpse is still with us in the milieu of abandoned portals. I am strongly against allowing recreation, as six years of hard evidence shows Calgary is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:46, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete – I concur with the detailed analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl and the comments of NH12. City portals, with the exceptions of the great Anglophone cities of Portal:London and Portal:New York, seldom attract re:aders.  Since several portals involving cities in Canada (and most of them are medium-sized to large and are Anglophone) have recently been nominated for deletion, I am providing the following table for comparison.

Discussion
As can be seen, city portals do not have even 1% as many pageviews as the city articles. The advocates of portals have not presented a case why underutilized navigational devices should be supported. If a future editor wants to implement an advanced-design portal that does not use forked subpages, with a plan for maintenance and viewers, they can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:27, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete cities don't need portals.Catfurball (talk) 23:42, 22 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.