Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cooperatives

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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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 04:48, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Cooperatives


Abandoned, static micro-portal with low pageviews. Redundant to the head article Cooperative and its fine navbox Template:Co-operatives.

Created in May 2007 by. The lead of WP:POG already warned "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance" ... and this one has not been maintained. After creating the portal, Gobonobo made two edits to it in 2010, and two in 2012. And that's it.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Cooperatives shows a small set of subpages which reflect the once-fashionable idea that portals should have a monthly edition, like a magazine. So we have Portal:Cooperatives/Selected article/May 2007 and Portal:Cooperatives/Selected article/June 2007 and similar pairs for quotes, pictures, and DYKs. As with nearly every portal which tried this, enthusiasm for making a monthly magazine every month rapidly faded, so in December 2008 an anon IP dumped the sub-pages and just added 4 paragraphs of text about credit unions as the "selected article". It has remained that way ever since.

WP:POG says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this portal has missed about 130 consecutive updates.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But practice this portal has not attracted maintainers for nearly a decade. And it also hasn't attracted readers: in January–June 2109, it got an average of only 13 pageviews per day, which is less than even the abysmal median for all portals of 17 daily views. However, the head article averaged 1,317 views per day, over 100 times as many as the portal.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But just as 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 add value over the head article. In this case, the portal has had almost no work, so it is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Cooperative and its fine navbox Template:Co-operatives.

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:Co-operatives, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.  Or try it on the list of 40 links at Cooperative.
 * 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 Cooperative, 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 abandoned portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. It is a failed solution to a non-problem, so it's long past time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:40, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - The characterization of recent nominations as abandoned static micro-portals is appropriate, and either being abandoned or being a micro-portal or being underviewed would be reasons for deletion. Creating portals is easy.  Creating useful portals is not easy.  Robert McClenon (talk) 23:55, 10 July 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.