Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia

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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. — xaosflux  Talk 16:06, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia


Abandoned, static portal. Tedundant to the head articles Indigenous Australians and Indigenous peoples of Australia.

Created in July 2017‎ by, who last edited in 2017.

The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia shows that the intention was to create a separate sub-page for each month of each year, but the plan was soon abandoned, as often happens with such ambitious plans for portals:


 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 1, 2018
 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 8, 2017
 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 9, 2017
 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 10, 2017
 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 11, 2017
 * Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 12, 2017

So instead, the current version of the portal just displays Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured article/Month 8, 2017 under the heading. So whatever the month, it will display the same topic, falsely claiming that it has been chosen for that month.

The picture section does the same thing, always display the same topic, always showing Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia/Featured picture/Month 8, 2017 while falsely claiming that it has been chosen for that month.

WP:POG says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed over 20 consecutive updates.

In theory, this could be defined as a broad topic. But in practice, it has not met 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". But in practice it has consistently failed to attract maintainers In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 7 pageviews per day, which is barely half the abysmal the median of 13 per day for all portals. The head article Indigenous Australians gets 2,512 views/day and Indigenous peoples of Australia gets  only 85 views/day.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this abandoned, static page is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Indigenous Australians and its excellent navbox Template:Indigenous Australians.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox 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 on e.g. Template:Indigenous Australians
 * 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 the article Indigenous Australians.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

That sets a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". It would take a lot of work to make a portal which genuinely offers more than the head article Indigenous Australians with its sidebar Indigenous Australians.

But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and a team of editors to maintain it ... so I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:11, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - As per the analysis and metrics by BHG. The pageviews for the portal are 0.27% of the pageviews for the two head articles, which is not unusual.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:42, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete It's pretty but is unmaintainable. The treatment is not what is expected at an encyclopedic article and it should not be a fork of that article. Johnuniq (talk) 09:59, 22 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 39 subpages, created 2017-07-31 20:13:39 by User:Wasechun tashunka. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. Portal:Indigenous peoples of Australia. Pldx1 (talk) 15:14, 25 May 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.