Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Saint Petersburg (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) 08:42, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Saint Petersburg


Automated clone portal, which is simply a wrapper around the relevant sections of the article Outline of Saint Petersburg.

Created in July 2018 by @The Transhumanist (TTH). There is no non-automated version to revert to.

Each box in the portal draws its article list solely from the relevant section of Outline of Saint Petersburg For example the bx lablled "Selected arts articles" is built with this code:

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 on e.g. Outline of Saint Petersburg
 * 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 Saint Petersburg.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

This redundancy has been belatedly acknowledged by TTH, who wrote at the start of this month New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow).

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) 05:01, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Previous discussion. This portal was previously discussed at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Bottom Importance Portals, a group nomination based on the Portal Projects's classification of the portals in Category:Bottom-importance Portal pages. That was withdrawn by the nominator on 24 March 2019, since most participants disputed the value of Portal Project's assessments.
 * This renomination is too allow discussion of the actual attributes of the portals, rather than of some disputed assessment.
 * Pinging the participants at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Bottom Importance Portals: . -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:19, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not going to participate since I closed the last discussion. OhanaUnitedTalk page 05:24, 21 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment. I am not having success with the mouseover feature, so I do not grasp what it does in practice. I use Firefox and thought I selected the correct option, to save in a new private window. But it was just the same as opening it without that feature. Mouseover (running the cursor over the images) made nothing new happen. I am on a laptop using Windows 10 if that matters. Would I see this feature on an Apple phone? But I am always logged in on the phone, too. I think I might understand this discussion better if I understood these new features that will organize a topic the way a portal does now.  --Prairieplant (talk) 06:48, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Prairieplant, you need to "Open link in new private window". Then mouseover any links to see preview, or click on any image to get the sldeshow. Just tested it in the latest Firefox 66.03, and it works fine. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:30, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I haven't seen the new features either, which I understand are available to logged-out users. They are not the main reason to delete unused portals.  This portal was developed toward the end of a wave of reckless portal creation by the portal platoon, and was meant to be unmaintained.  It has an arithmetic mean of 6 daily pageviews during the 1 Jan - 28 Feb 2019 period.  (That figure is inflated by a weird peak probably due to the portal platoon looking at the portal, and the median is 4, but that doesn't matter.)  Advocates of portals for big cities will say that this is a big city, and a portal is in order.  We can see that portals for big cities are not used.  There were an average of 4,144 daily pageviews of the article.  Big cities don't need portals.  Does someone want to manage a labor-intensive miniature Main Page on this city?  If so, this MFD is without prejudice.  Robert McClenon (talk) 14:46, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Automated portal,  0 subpages, created 2018-07-14 21:54:27 by User:TTH, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality: Portal:Saint Petersburg. Pldx1 (talk) 13:32, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete I agree with Robert and Pldx1 - this portal is useless and unneeded. Geoffroi (talk) 19:59, 26 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.