Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Saskatchewan

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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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 23:25, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Saskatchewan



 * Note: In January 2016, and  were both redirected by @DexDor to Portal:Saskatchewan.  Each portal had been abandoned as a sea of redlinks (see abandoned P:Saskatoon and abandoned P:Regina).  Each has some subpages which should be deleted along with the redirects: see Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Saskatoon and Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Regina.

Abandoned portal on the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It has a substantial set of sub-pages, and ten years ago this was a good portal ... but this have been abandoned for about a decade, and low readership means that the abandonment is unlikely to change.

The portal was created in August 2007‎ by. The lead of WP:POG says "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... but SriMesh's last edit to any part of this portal was in Feb 2009 (see portal-space contribs), and since Srimesh moved on to other interests, this one has not been maintained.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This fails on all three counts:
 * 1) Narrow topic . Repeated evidence of many dozens of portals examined at MFD over the last 6 months is few sub-national entities constitute a broad enough topic to sustain a portal. Saskatchewan has a 2019 estimated population of only 1.17 million, and few portals for that size of population have been kept after examination at MFD.
 * 2) Low readership .  The portal's daily average of only 10 views per day is trivially low.
 * 3) Lack of maintainers . This portal has not been almost entirely abandoned since 2010, and falls well short of the "large numbers" of maintainers required by WP:POG.  Details below.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Saskatchewan shows:

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 Saskatchewan topics, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it only on any link in the head article Saskatchewan.
 * 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 Saskatchewan, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of 70 images.  It's a vastly better image gallery than the portal.

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

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whetever value it might have had it 2008, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:56, 18 August 2019 (UTC) Robert McClenon (talk) 22:31, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * 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 abandoned junk which misleads them by stating a long dead person is still alive. Stuff like that clearly harms Wikipedia's reputation for quality. I am strongly against allowing recreation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Saskatchewan is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 15:05, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete – I thank User:BrownHairedGirl for bringing the last Canadian administrative division portal to MFD. (I was planning to write it up.)  Portal:Saskatchewan has possibly the best subpage-best portal design that I have seen, with a branched tree structure for the addition of topic branches to an arbitrary amount of depth.  In addition to the usual Articles, Biographies, and Pictures, this portal has Attractions, Communities, and Highways, and could have other topics added, and has a capability for users to nominate additional articles.  In other words, this is almost a good portal design; but it has the fatal flaw of most heritage portal designs that it uses forked subpages.  I concur with the analysis by BHG.  It has not been adequately maintained and had only 11 pageviews in June-July 2019.  I am providing the following table containing metrics for all of the Canadian provinces and territories, using the June-July 2019 baseline.

Discussion
As can be seen, none of the portals for the 13 provinces and territories of Canada have as many as 20 daily pageviews. None of these national or subnational portals has 1% as many pageviews as its head article.

If a future editor wants to implement an advanced-design portal that does not use forked subpages, with a plan for maintenance and viewers, they can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:31, 18 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Note to closing admin. If you close this 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 (in this case Portal:canada), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:21, 25 August 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.