Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Elbe–Weser triangle

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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 by its creator to project-space at Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Portal:Elbe–Weser triangle -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:38, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Elbe–Weser triangle

 * – (View MfD)

Almost unviewed portal on a very narrow topic: the Elbe–Weser triangle, an informal geographical region of the German state of Lower Saxony. The experience of the last 6 months of MFD scrutiny of portals is that it very rare for any portal on a sub-national region to attain the critical mass of readers and maintainers to make it viable ... but this is two steps behind even that, because it is not just a second-level country subdivision, but an informal one. That's too small a niche.

Like most of en.wp German portals, this one was diligently created by, who in 2010 translated it from de:Portal:Elbe-Weser-Dreieck. Like most such portals, it uses German Wikipedia's "mega-navbox" style of portal. This has navbox-like lists of articles to provide direct access to lots of articles, complete with the built-in previews available to non-logged-in readers on all en.wp pages. It's vastly more usable than the predominant but hideous one-subpage-at-a-time model. Sadly, readers seem no more interested in it than in the sub-page portals, so in Jan–Jun 2019 this portal averaged a median of only |Portal:Elbe-Weser_triangle|Portal:Elbe-Weser_Triangle 5 views day, which is barely above background noise. That level of views may be fully accounted for just by editors poking about.

Similarly, the lists of featured articles and good articles are empty. This may indicate the 2010 state of play on de.wp, or the state on en.wp when the portal was translated in 2010, or maybe it's the current situation. It's hard to know, because there is no associated WP:WikiProject:Elbe–Weser triangle to assess and grade articles. WP:POG has been downgraded to an info page, but its guidance in this respect was excellent: "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This portal lacks both the supply and the maintainers.

Little seems to have been done with the portal beyond translation from German, and subsequent disambiguation. For example, there are two items under the heading "Did you know that ...?", but neither has any connection to the scrutinised process at WP:DYK. The lead of WP:DYK says: "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section." ...bit this is just a trivia section.

In discussion of similar portals, Bermicourt has asserted that the main function of portals such as this is to assist editors. If that is also the case here, then I would happily support re-creating the portal in project space, as has been done for example with the former Portal:Berlin, which is now at WP:WikiProject Germany/Portal:Berlin.

However, I think that the most important legacy of this portal would be as navboxes. The various sections of the portal consist of all bluelinks, and could simply and quickly be repurposed as interlinked navboxes. This would be huge benefit to readers, because a navbox is displayed on each article in the set, so readers don't need to navigate to a separate portal page to get the benefit of this set of links. For one example of how this can be done, see e.g. Template:County Armagh constituencies and its 31 cross-linked sibling navboxes, all of which I created a few years ago. I would be happy to assist in doing the same here.

After 9 years, it's very clear that it is serving no purpose, because readers don't want to visit this portal as a standalone page. So the best way to make use of Bermicourt's good faith hard work in creating it is to bring the portal to the readers, by conversion to navboxes. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:49, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * 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:Lower Saxony), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:50, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Moved to project space. Bermicourt (talk) 16:52, 1 October 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.