Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Capital District (2nd nomination)

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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) 08:22, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Capital District


Abandoned mini-portal about the regions surrounding the state capital of New York state. Low pageviews, and redundant to the head article Capital District, New York and the navbox Template:Capital District.

Created in December 2009‎ by. The lead of WP:POG says "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained. MattWade made 22 edits to this portal in 2011, one in early 2013, and nothing in the 6 years since then.

WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so editors are free to move on other interests. However portals still require maintenance by somebody, esp if they use the popular but ill-conceived and outdated multi-subpage model, as this portal does.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Capital District shows 12 Selected articles and 6 Selected biographies. All but one of them was created in 2010 or 2011 by MattWade; the other was created in 2011 by a different editor. I have checked a sample, and found none which have had any significant text editing since then.

There is no collection of DYKs, and no news. Just Portal:Capital District/Quality content, which is a list of FAs and GAs that was also last updated in 2011.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". It is hard to even theoretically define this district as a "broad topic", because it has a population only 1.13 million, and in recent months MFD has deleted many dozens of portals about similarly-sized cities and regions because they have been abandoned and unread. In this case, we can see that the portals has been unmaintained for the last 8 years, and also that in January–June 2019 it got an average of only 8 pagviews per day.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. And in this case, the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Capital District, New York and its navbox. The head article has several embedded lists, multiple navboxes, and since it is written in summary style with a ToC, it offer excellent showcasing of sub-topics.

The only thing the portal theoretically offers above the head article is the display of article excerpts and selected images. However, they are displayed only one at a time, and an alternative set is available only by the crude and counter-intuitive mechanism of purging the page.

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 this link to Template:Capital District, 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 this link to the article Capital District, New York, 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 this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value it might have had it 2009, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:42, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * PS. Note the previous discussion, in 2010: WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Capital District.
 * Promises of improvement, which lasted only a short time after the MFD, then resumed neglect.
 * That's why POG requires large numbers of maintainers: portals need ongoing maintenance, not a just brief spurt of activity whenever a portal is brought to MFD. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:31, 31 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete – When I first saw this MFD, I misread it and thought that it was one that I had assessed as delete-ready in my review of Australian portals, Portal:Australian Capital Territory. No.  This is a different portal, but I concur with User:BrownHairedGirl.  This is a regional portal, but it isn't a nation, a state of the United States, a county in the United States, a city, or whatever.  It has 8 daily pageviews, as contrasted with 133 for the article, and no maintenance since 2013.  Robert McClenon (talk) 19:21, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the thorough investigation by the nominator. This long abandoned portal clearly fails WP:POG because it lacks almost any readers and has had no maintainers for many years due to being an extremely narrow subject. It's possible functionality is also superseded by Capital District, New York and its navbox, which are better able to do what this portal was created to do, as described by BHG. It even lacks many of the standard portal features, like a DYK or news section. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:58, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal was poorly made.Catfurball (talk) 21:20, 6 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.