Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Isle of Man (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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 04:50, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Isle of Man


Mini-portal abandoned since 2011, with v low usage.

Created on 26 July 2006‎ by, who last edited en.wp in 2012, and whose last edit to any portal was the day they created this one. This was three months before the lead of WP:POG first warned editors "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance." ... and apart from a few edits in 2011, this one has not been maintained.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Isle of Man shows a thin set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Isle of Man/Selected picture: only one page, showing the same picture since Feb 2007
 * Portal:Isle of Man/Selected article/1: no edits since the edit which created it in 2011
 * Portal:Isle of Man/Selected article/2: no edits since the edit which created it in 2011
 * Portal:Isle of Man/Did you know/1, /2 and /3 were all created in 2011, and have had only tweaks since then. . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this eight-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section.  I have not checked whether these items have anything to do with WP:DYK, and having encountered many portals wth fake DYK sections, I don't take that for granted.  But even if we assume they are genuinely sourced from the WP:DYK, we have a problem: DYKs are fact-checked at time of publication, but those facts may become outdated.  Yet this section presents them all as if they were current facts, not decade-old snippets.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". We could conduct a debate about the theoretical question of whether an island with a 2016 population of only 83,000 is a "broad topic", but we don't need to rely on theory: we have data. In practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers. It has also failed to gain readers: in January–June 2019, the portal got only 12 page views per day, which is less than even the abysmal median for portals of 17 views per day. Meanwhile the head article Isle of Man got 4,691 daily views. So readers prefer the head article by a ratio of 383:1.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Isle of Man and its navbox Template:Isle of Man.

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:Isle of Man, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.  Try it too on the article Isle of Man, which is mostly written in summary style, so offers lots more links to key topics.
 * 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 Isle of Man, 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. Now that mouseover previews and built-in-image-galleries are provided on every page, this portal is just a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:04, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete good research and justification from, agree completely. Harrias  talk 12:57, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. This portal has not been maintained for several years, has too few readers, and has too few articles.  The portal guidelines (if indeed they are guidelines) say that a portal should have at least 20 articles, and should attract readers and portal maintainers.  (If that page is not a guideline, then we can either Ignore All Rules or Use Common Sense.)  Since the portal lists related portals, which either are British, or (like the Isle of Man), have an ambiguous status as to whether they are British, they are shown here:

As can be seen, some of them are not well-maintained and not much seen. Some of these portals should be deleted. To make a use-mention distinction, or not to make one,we are not allowed to discuss whether any of the subjects of the portals should be deleted. But Portal:Isle of Man should be deleted. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:37, 11 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment – The first MfD discussion for this portal is located at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Isle of Man. North America1000 08:12, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Silver bullets may be needed. The MFD shows that the conclusion was to delete or merge this portal (into Portal:United Kingdom, but the Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom), but it was not deleted or merge.  So it appears to be a zombie portal.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:10, 12 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.