Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Rome

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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. WP:TNT based deletion, so a properly curated item can still be created. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:56, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Rome


Static micro-portal on the city of Rome. Abandoned since 2010.

Created in January 2010‎ by, who last edited in 2013.

It escaped the wave of automation in 2018, but Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Rome shows a v small set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Rome/Did you know. Not  a DYK, just a mini-essay wfrom which the sources have ben removed,  Otherwise unchanged since 2010.
 * Portal:Rome/Featured article. Same topic (Pope  Pius XII) since 2010.

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 consecutive updates.

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". But like most city portals, it has consistently failed to attract maintainers.

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 Rome and its navboxes, e.g. Template:Monuments of Rome.

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:Monuments of Rome, and mouseover some links
 * 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 the article Rome, and then click on any image to start the slideshow.

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 Rome.

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) 07:20, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Analysis of Rome and City Portals
I concur with the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl.

Philosophers make a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, between knowledge that is available in advance and knowledge that must be based on observation. The advocates of portals frequently say that a particular topic is a broad subject area, and so the subject should have a portal. It is possible to decide a priori that particular types of subject areas, such as countries, or big cities, are broad subject areas. However, that is an incomplete quotation of the portal guidelines, and, because of its incompleteness, is misleading. The portal guidelines say that "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." It is not possible to decide a priori that a subject area will attract readers and portal maintainers. That must be observed, and assessed a posteriori.

The following table shows data on portals about 42 cities so far, most of which are the subject of deletion discussions, and a few of which (New York City, London, and Tokyo) have been added for comparison. Some of them are small cities. Some of them are big cities. Rome, like New York City, London, Tokyo, and Beijing, is not only a big city, but one of the greatest cities of the Earth. It is also an ancient city, the second oldest in the list. Data in the table is based on a baseline period of 1 Jan 2019 – 28 Feb 2019.

What can be seen is that portals have less than 1% of the daily pageviews of the head article for the city, with a few exceptions for small cities. Big city portals do not attract interested readers to nearly the degree that big city articles do. We have also seen that big city portals that do not attract large numbers of interested readers also do not attract portal maintainers.

Portal:Rome has 45 daily pageviews, which is the second highest of any city portal that I have examined so far. However, it does not have a portal maintainer. A portal that has been without a portal maintainer for a period of years is a portal that is not attracting a portal maintainer and is not likely to attract a portal maintainer. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:34, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Wow, @ Robert, that must have taken a lot of work! But thank you very much for taking the time to do it.
 * I was most struck by the result of sorting by portal pageviews. Only 4 city portals (New York, London, Rome, Tokyo) exceed 20 pageviews per day. For comparison I checked the pageviews for a few Irish small towns, which in other European countries would be classed as villages: Dunmanway, Mohill, Easky, Portumna, Stradbally: and those five averaged |Mohill|Easky|Portumna|Stradbally just under 20 hits per day.
 * So only the portals some 4 of the most renowned world cities exceed the viewing rates for an Irish small town. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:22, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Discussion of Rome and City Portals

 * add your keep/delete/comment here


 * Delete without prejudice to re-creating a portal when a portal maintainer is available. If a portal maintainer volunteers while this MFD is open, I will change my !vote, probably to Neutral. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:34, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: in theory broad enough, in practice it isn't. To make it broad enough, and to fulfil its reason for existing, a portal maintainer is required.  Therefore, delete without prejudice to curated recreation.  Hail Caesar!  Wait...   SITH   (talk)   11:26, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 10 subpages, created 2010-01-17 10:36:32 by User:Theologiae. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. Portal:Rome. Pldx1 (talk) 13:24, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * No prejudica against recreation of a fully functional portal with multiple selections, etc. North America1000 00:03, 30 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.