Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Railways in India (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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Railways in India


Abandoned portal about Rail transport in India.

Created in September 2009‎ by, whose last edit to this nportal was in 2010. 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:Railways in India shows an initially encouraging list of pages. But on closer inspection it is is less impressive:
 * Portal:Railways in India/Selected railway bridge/1 still shows the same content as in 2010. an infobox for Pamban bridge
 * Portal:Railways in India/Selected route/1 stil shows the same Howrah–Nagpur–Mumbai line as when it was created in 2017
 * Portal:Railways in India/Selected station/1 was created in September 2017‎, and had one change of topic, in 2018
 * Portal:Railways in India/Selected train/1 was created in September 2017‎, and had one change of topic, in 2018
 * Portal:Railways in India/Railways in India news is still displaying the same 4 news items as in 2010, but under the heading .  So 50 years from now it will be displaying "2069 in in rail transport in India" above the same stories from 2010 or earlier.
 * Portal:Railways in India/Selected clip/1, added in 2017, same clip ever since
 * Portal:Railways in India/Did you Know.../1 still shows 2 of the 4 items which it displayed in 2010. . 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 9-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * There is also Portal:Railways in India/Selected article/1 to /7, which I have not checked.

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 110 updates, but it seems that have only two partial updates, in 2017 and 2018.

India has a lot of railways, so theory, this a broad topic. But in practice, it has been almost unmaintained.

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 Rail transport in India.

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 by right-clicking on this link to Template:Urban rail transit in India
 * 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 Rail transport in India, and then click on any image.

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 Confucianism with its sidebar Confucianism.

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) 11:35, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: abandoned portals serve no purpose.   SITH   (talk)   11:23, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 33 subpages, created 2009-09-06 06:43:29 by User:Sharadbob. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. ONE route, ONE train, ONE station, what a broad coverage. Portal:Railways in India. Pldx1 (talk) 13:15, 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.