Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Islamabad

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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. ‑Scottywong | [squeal] || 22:30, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Islamabad

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected portal.
 * Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 10 for the portal versus 1537 for the parent article (.651%).
 * Created in 2009 by the only maintainer,, who only maintained it for about a month. They haven't been as active, even though they did resume editing recently.
 * Sixteen selected articles, none of which were extensively updated since 2009 outside of routine maintenance.

Time to just delete this already. ToThAc (talk) 19:41, 3 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:Pakistan), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:58, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense.  It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers.  This imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense:  (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained.  Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
 * Comment - The table below shows that the other two city portals in Pakistan do not have much better metrics. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:51, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Islamabad

 * Delete - Low viewing, low number of articles, little maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:51, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Pakistan cities portal

 * Keep - Give me some time, I'll update articles, though they don't need much maintainance due to their subject. Pakieditor (talk) 08:05, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid your vote qualifies under WP:MERCY. Updating articles also won't magically fix the portal's problems; an actual maintenance plan that takes into account the failures of many portals may be taken to WP:DRV. ToThAc (talk) 16:17, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid that this is a valid forum for challenging the nomination, and there is no requirement for someone who wishes to continue improving this portal to shut up and wait for a DRV. Also, although this nomination contains the usual deletionist copypasta (there's even a template for it), we are here to examine Portal:Islamabad rather than the failures of many portals. Certes (talk) 01:45, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I suggest caution in considering Pakieditor's offer. I am sure it was made in good faith, but it doesn't look to me like a remedy to this portal's neglect.
 * Wikiscan shows Pakieditor as having made only 1,009 undeleleted edits in their 15 months on Wikipedia, plus 208 deleted edits. Those edits include the creation of six portals which were later deleted: Portal:Islamic Golden Age, Portal:Rawalpindi, Portal:Transport in Pakistan, Portal:Pakistan International Airlines, Portal:Economy of Pakistan, Portal:Roads in Pakistan.  So I don't see the good faith being accompanied by the experience and good judgement needed to maintain a portal.
 * I also note that in the months after those narrow portals were deleted, Pakieditor's portal-space contributions were all trivial, until they began s flurry of activity once the MFD opened. This is a pattern of editing we have seen many time sbefoire with portals: long-term neglect, then a flurry of edits when an MFD is opened, usually followed by resumed neglect.
 * WP:POG was right about some things, including that portals need both multiple maintainers and supporting WikiProjects. In this case we have only one inexperienced editor interested in maintenance, and WP:WikiProject Islamabad is inactive. That's a recipe for continued failure. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Can't give all of my time for maintaining portals and their wikiprojects, or Wikipedia in general. Pakieditor (talk) 16:19, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Of course, @Pakieditor. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY. Like everyone else here, you're a volunteer.  You manage your own time as you see fit, and the community is grateful for whatever you can give.
 * But still, a portal needs maintainers. Unless there is some group of editors who can put the time into a portal, then that portal isn't viable. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 00:04, 11 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep - TalhaDiscuss  &#169; 13:13, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Per WP:JUSTAVOTE, this vote will be omitted. Please provide a rationale. ToThAc (talk) 16:17, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * ...or perhaps the closer will apply their own judgement. Certes (talk) 01:45, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep, no convincing rationale for deletion has been given. Selected articles are mostly timeless, don't seem to have any major problems. Pageviews are nonnegative, which is good enough. —Kusma (t·c) 15:10, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * "Timelessness" isn't a valid argument to use here. Common sense says that all undermaintained areas must be deleted. Any future maintenance plans that actually take into account the failures of many other portals may be taken to WP:DRV. (Though personally, I don't believe cities make good topics for a portal at all, given that nearly every city portal was deleted.) ToThAc (talk) 16:17, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Nordfriesland – Dithmarschen Nord is ten years out of date, but I don't see anybody deleting it. Unlike this portal, it does not update automatically. And "timeless" is an absolutely valid argument: if selected articles don't need any updates for ten years, why should a lack of edits be a concern? —Kusma (t·c) 16:25, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Kusma, we keep articles even when neglected, because they are they actual content of the encyclopedia. We hope that they may be improved, but in the meantime, they are our only content on that topic.
 * By contrast, portals contain no unique content.  Their function is to navigate and/or showcase content which is hosted elsewhere on en.wp.  So a portal can be deleted without any loss of content.
 * Like categories, portals are utility pages, whose worth consists solely in whether they add value for readers, over and above what is available in the head article and related pages. In the last 6 months, over 900 MFD discussions have deleted portals which don't add value for readers.  I am sad to see that after all that discussion, and the sustained consensus on the principle on that portals are a tool to be judged by their utility, we still find that a small number of editors clutter up MFDs with spurious requests to treat portals as if they were articles. This repeated flogging of dead horses and serving of read herrings are significant part of the factors which have soured too many portal discussions this year. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 13:12, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Merge up all cities of Pakistan to Portal:Pakistan. As these cities contain a large share the population of the country, nothing in the city portals can be foreign to the national portal. bd2412  T 16:49, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete I do not think individual cities are a broad enough subject area to deserve a portal on their own. SD0001 (talk) 17:59, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep - Editors here are willing to improve the portal, WP:IAR? states: "Editing Wikipedia is all about making improvements, not following rules. However, WP:IAR should not be used as a reason to make unhelpful edits." how is it helpful to delete a portal that editors are willing to maintain? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:06, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
 * That definitely weakens one of the arguments for deletion, but it's not enough. If pageviews are abysmally low, then time is better spent improving the parent article or the inactive WikiProject. ToThAc (talk) 15:22, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per delete votes above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Portals are not content, being for navigation instead, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated and useless portals to articles and say they should just be fixed. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised at the last minute just to stave off deletion. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve potentially inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, as proposed by BrownHairedGirl, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 16:40, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. This is yet another failed portal on a narrow topic, which has attracted neither readers nor maintainers, and offers significantly less utility than the head article in respect of both the key portals functions: navigation and showcasing.
 * The head article Islamabad is a reasonably well-maintained B-class article, which provides good showcasing of sub-topics through its use of WP:SUMMARYSTYLE, and excellent navigation through its navboxes.
 * By contrast, the portal has been neglected for a decade, offers a massively narrower range of topics, and hides its very limited contents within an absurd Rube Goldberg machine structure of sub-pages which are not even listed on the face of the portal, and in which alternative items are displayed only by the user-hostile mechanism of purging the page to get another random selection from the undisclosed set. It would be hard to devise a more perverse way of displaying information, especially when the whole preview model is now redundant to the preview-any-link facility built into the Wikimedia software and available on every page to logged-out readers (i.e. the vast majority of ordinary readers, for whom we build Wikipedia).
 * The failure of this portal is wholly unsurprising. It has a population of only about one million, and in the last six months nearly every portals on a  city of that size or smaller has been deleted, because they have failed to attract enough readers and editors to make a viable portal.  Only much larger and more globally-significant city portals have survived. Additionally, Islamabad is a modern, planned city whose panning began only in the 1950s.  Its scope is therefore much narrower than a cit whose history goes back centuries.
 * A further problem with this portal is that it lacks an accompanying WikiProject. Yes, WP:WikiProject Islamabad exists; but it has been tagged as inactive since 2011. And it seems never to have really existed: the history of its talkpage shows no discussion ever, just 4 notices in the 8 years since the page was created. So there is no assessment process to help identify articles which might be included in the portal, and there is no pool of editors working on Islamabad topics who might help maintain the portal.
 * These problems are structural and long-term. No amount of enthusiasm from one inexperienced editor can override the narrowness of scope, the lack of history, the lack of a supporting WikiProject and vast gap between the fine head article and the abominably-designed portal. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:21, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete we doon't need city portals period.Catfurball (talk) 17:50, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Topic is way too narrow - a capital city of only 1m people.  Portal is effectively abandoned with no willing maintainers.  Portal adds nothing over the main article+navbox (the navboxes are actually very good and probably contribute to the abandonment of the portal by editors and readers). Britishfinance (talk) 17:05, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Upmerge selected content to Portal:Pakistan. Islamabad seems too narrow per my proposal for whether a topic is broad enough for a portal. SportingFlyer  T · C  05:27, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per above and for being a harmful content fork. I'm particularly troubled by the section "Administrative divisions of Islamabad", which does not seem to be present in the parent article or any related articles. It's not a list of links so it serves no navigational purpose. It should be moved to main namespace and properly sourced. Nemo 08:25, 16 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.