Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Rivers State

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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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 05:04, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Rivers State


Micro-portal abandoned since its creation in 2015 by a sockpuppeteer.

Created[January 2015‎ Stanleytux ] in January 2015‎ by. The lead of WP:POG has said since late 2006 "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance", but that has not happened here: Stanleytux's last edit to any part of this portal was on 1 February 2015. And it's not going to happen because Stanleytux was indef-blocked in Sept 2018 for abusing multiple accounts, and for undisclosed paid editing.. Note that one of Stanleytux's socks was, who created Portal:Port Harcourt, which was recently deleted at Portal:Port HarcourtMFD:Portal:Port Harcourt.

(Aside I just checked recent MFDs, and I find that over 30 of the recently-deleted portals which were created by sockpuppeteers.)

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Rivers State shows a thin set of sub-pages:
 * one city page: Portal:Rivers State/Cities/1, about Port Harcourt
 * 3 selected articles
 * 2 selected biographies
 * Portal:Rivers State/Topics, which is just a transclusion of the navbox Template:Rivers State
 * One selected picture: File:Water house, Lagos Island.jpg. It's poor quality photo, and Lagos Island isn't even in Rivers State.

And that's it. 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 Rivers State and its navbox Template:Rivers State. There is no list of topics or anything else to add value.

WP:POG recomends that portals have a "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles.". This manages only 30% of that bare minimum.

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:Rivers State, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * 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 Rivers State, 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.

WP:POG guides that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In this case, there have been no maintainers, and hardly any readers: in Jan–Feb 2019 it got 8 pageviews per day, barely half the abymsal median for all portals of 15 views per day, and a tiny fraction of the 314 views per day for the head article Rivers State.

I usually propose that an abandoned portal be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal. But there is overwhelming evidence at recent MFDs that sub-national geographical entities rarely form a viable broad topic for anything other than a limited set of topics in the most-developed English-speaking nations. So in this case, I say just delete this portal and its sub-pages. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:08, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete on breadth-of-subject-area grounds; can be more than adequately covered by Portal:Nigeria. UnitedStatesian (talk) 00:59, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I concur with the analysis by BHG. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 15  subpages, created 2015-01-31 21:08:32 by User:Stanleytux. Never went alive (3 articles, 2 bios). Nothing to keep. Portal:Rivers State. Pldx1 (talk) 11:03, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - I concur with the observation by User:BrownHairedGirl that an excessive number of portals have been created by sockpuppeteers, and by banned editors. The portals are being deleted on their own merits or lack thereof, but perhaps this illustrates simply that flamers and warriors do not have judgment as to when portals are needed and cannot maintain them.  Robert McClenon (talk) 12:26, 4 June 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.