Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North American railways

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:54, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:North American railways


Static micro-portal, abandoned since 2011. No list of topics, no rotation of topics, never updated.

Created in February 2011‎ by, who also created and abandoned sveral other portals as little more than drafts. See e.g. MFD:3 abandoned draft portals by Chnou and MFD:Portal:Brittany.

The lead of WP:POG says "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:North American railways shows a tiny set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:North American railways/Selected article. Same topic (Canadian National) as in 2011.
 * Portal:North American railways/Famous people. Same 3 names as in 2011
 * Portal:North American railways/Did you know. Nothing to do with WP:DYK, just a paragraph about Union Pacific Railroad, also unchanged since 2011.
 * Portal:North American railways/Selected picture. Same image (File:Eastbound over SCB.jpg) since 2011
 * Portal:North American railways/Railway news, still reporting the same 2009 news story that it reported in 2011

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 90 consecutive updates.

There are a lot of miles of rail track in North America, so in theory this 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". It has consistently failed to attract maintainers, and in Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 11 pageviews per day.

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) 10:46, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: abandoned portals serve no purpose.   SITH   (talk)   11:23, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. There is no single head article to compare this portal against (and so I am very skeptical of the idea that someone will build a better portal), but, hey, maybe we need as many as disused unfinished portals on railways (by continent or country) as we can develop.  Robert McClenon (talk) 15:46, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - as bad as the previous. Pldx1 (talk) 13:17, 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.