Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Odisha

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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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:11, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Odisha

 * – (View MfD)

Abandoned bonsai portal on the Indian state of Odisha, formerly known as Orissa. Automated then reverted to manual. Only 9 articles, plus 8-year-old stale news and a ten-year-old stale DYK. Few quality articles in its scope; WikiProject at best semi-active; no maintainers; and only 11 views/day.

Created as Portal:Orissa on 14 March 2009‎ by, whose last edit to any part of the portal was only three weeks later, on 6 April 2009 (see Ravichandar84's portal-space contribs). Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has warned "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create", but Ravichandar84 did not follow that guidance.

In 2011, a significant amount of maintenance work was done by (Odisha1's portal-space contribs), who also created some sub-pages. Odisha1's last edit to any part of the portal was in July 2011, after which there is no sign of any maintenance or expansion, apart from technical edits such as disambiguation and removing or replacing deleted image files.

In June 2011, rightly moved Portal:Orissa to Portal:Odisha, following promptly after the legal renaming of the state.

That left the portal with a slim set of sub-pages, cluttered by some redirects left over from a restructuring. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Odisha shows: None of the 9 pages has had any non-trivial edits since 2011.
 * Portal:Odisha/Selected articles, with 5 articles (one of which is a redirect, so really 4) plus Portal:Odisha/Selected biography with 5 articles. That's a total 9, less than half the WP:POG minimum of 20. (Yes, I do know that after 6 months of specifying a bare minimum of twenty, POG was reverted to an earlier version which makes that a fuzzy target.  But I hope that unlike the reverter, editors will exercise WP:COMMONSENSE and recognise that even 20 articles is a woefully small set to provide a decent sample of any non-trivial topic, and that a mere 9 is a risible waste of time.)
 * Portal:Odisha/Did you know, which since 2009‎ has displayed the same item. This is a genuine DYK-source item, but 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". This ten-year-old item loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section.
 * Portal:Odisha/News has displayed the same items since 2011. They are dated only as "Jun 19" etc, with no year, so they mislead the reader into thinking that this is news from the current year.

So it's just a slim set of 8–10 year-old content forks. This neglect is presumably why the portal was "restarted" in Feb 2019 by @The Transhumanist (TTH). This "restart" converted the portal into an automated clone tool, which drew all its selected articles from the navbox Template:Odisha, and made the portal just a bloated version of the navbox, just like the navbox-clone portalspam which was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two). So in May 2019, I (BHG) reverted the portal to a pre-automated version. That restored the portal to its abandoned state, from which it has not been rescued.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "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 fails on all four counts:
 * 1)  Broad topic .  contains only 2500 articles, but very few of high quality. The table in Category:Odisha articles by quality shows only 5 GA/FA articles. That set is far too small to present a balanced set of topics without using much lower-grade articles, and making severe compromises on quality.
 * 2)  High readership .  The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 11 views per day is trivially low.
 * 3)  Lots of maintainers . No. The last substantive maintenance was in 2011.
 * 4)  WikiProject involvement . No. WP:WikiProject Odisha is at best semi-active, so I have just tagged it as semi-active, .   The project shows zero interest in the portal.  Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Odisha has never been archived, and contains zero mentions of this portal.

This portal was created in good faith when active editor numbers were at their peak and portalmania at its height and when there seems to have been a culture of ignoring much of the portal guidelines. But for the last 8 years, with fewer editors, there has been no interest in maintaining a portal on this topic, and almost no interest in reading it. Time to just delete it. And since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:28, 18 September 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:India), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:57, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Odisha
Robert McClenon (talk) 03:46, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. News is easy to automate, so that there is even less excuse for having that be obsolete.  Perhaps the only reason for DYKs in portals is that having a general trivia section is fun for the portal author (even if it is against the guidelines).  Low readership, too few articles that are not maintained.
 * Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator,  Brown HairedGirl . Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to an over eight year long abandoned portal and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as over eight years of hard evidence shows Odisha is not a broad enough topic per WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:27, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this state doesn't need a portal.Catfurball (talk) 22:50, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per analysis by BrownHairedGirl. -Crossroads- (talk) 04:52, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Another abandoned and not maintained portal.--Darwinek (talk) 22:31, 24 September 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.