Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Territories of the United States

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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) 08:21, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Territories of the United States



 * (note redirects from Portal:American Samoa, Portal:Guam, Portal:Northern Mariana Islands, Portal:Territories of the United States, Portal:U.S. Virgin Islands, Portal:United States Territories, Portal:United States Virgin Islands)

Redundant, almost unused portal.

This is, and always been, a single-page portal. It was created on 7 September 2018‎ as just a bare list of topics, and a few days later transformed it into a nicely-formatted single-page portal, using an embedded list of topics.

It's quite pretty and it works fine ... but it's also pointless.

The list of topics consists only of 19 items, which is an almost perfect clone of the relevant two line of Template:United States political divisions. The parrls omits Bajo Nuevo Bank, and adds 1985 Puerto Rico floods and Puerto Rican Campaign.

The image slideshow simply transcludes the images used in the head article Territories of the United States.

So this portal adds nothing to the head article. The head article transcludes Template:United States political divisions, so all those links are in the head article. All the portal adds is the preview of the articles, and this slideshow of images ... except that those are no longer additions.

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:United States political divisions, 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 Territories of the United States, 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.

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value it might have had five years ago, it now adds nothing to the head article apart from the trivia of DYK and news.

It hasn't attracted readers. In January–June 2019, it had a median of only |Portal:United_States_Territories|Portal:Guam|Portal:Northern_Mariana_Islands|Portal:United_States_Virgin_Islands 4 pageviews per day (including all redirects). It therefore fails that WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

This portal adds no value, and readers don't want it. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:47, 31 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete – When I first saw this MFD,I thought that it was one that I had reviewed and thought was incomplete and little-used. Yes.  Its history is that it was created as a single-page portal in September by an editor who immediately departed (or changed socks).  The best baseline period for pageviews is Jan-Feb 2019, because the portal was renamed in April, which complicates things.  During that period there were 84 total pageviews.  That's the sum; the mean is 1.  The article had  2493 average daily.  The portal consists of a list of 19 articles; that's about all.  This portal shows that the abstract concept of "broad subject area" is useless.  The subject has almost as broad a subject area as can be defined, at least in terms of square kilometers of water area.  But it isn't viewed or maintained.  Delete it. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:13, 31 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - Adds no value to the project. While we're at it delete the WikiProjects United States Territories (sarcasm - I've marked it inactive). But seeing this makes me think, I'll just one day decide to create a Project or Portal called "Thin People" and mark every article of people who are thin and then leave it at that, and never do anything at all to the project. My goodness- gracious- me. I've searched and I don't see anything at all was done for that project or this portal. Thanks. Cheers.--The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 19:30, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - User:The Eloquent Peasant - My notes don't say exactly, but this is not the only time that I have seen that an editor created a portal and then departed from Wikipedia. Two or three years ago, on New Page Patrol, one of the problems that the encyclopedia anyone can edit had was editors who wanted to make their contribution to Wikipedia by creating one article, and who hadn't learned the complicated details of referencing.  (They also made mistakes that made no sense, such as thinking that their account name should be the same as the name of the article so that they could maintain it.)  They wanted to make one contribution.  (They weren't interested in helping us with the 5.8 million articles that we already have.)  There are also editors whose contribution to Wikipedia is to create one portal.  This is like a gift of a white elephant.  A white elephant is an expensive gift requiring feeding.  Because it is an albino, it cannot do ordinary elephant work or it will be sunburned.  In South Asia and Southeast Asia, a white elephant could be given as a gift by a great ruler to a minor noble who had pretensions.  We have been given a lot of these white elephant portals, and some of them are fancy-looking but useless albinos that are not up to ordinary elephant work.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:18, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - I always like to think they had good intentions. Then I also like to check and when I check, if i remember correctly, it seems that that particular editor was using AWB and perhaps tagging Talk Pages with the template just to increase his edit count. Who knows the intentions of people, really? Only he or she knows why. With Puerto Rico it's a constant battle, a constant argument too. Its territorial status causes a lot of bad feelings among people. There are editors who remove it from a country list, other editors include it on country lists, sometimes it's under the U.S. other times it's not, most of the time it just slips through the cracks. I'm just left scratching my head and trying to do the right thing- I'm always open to learning.-The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 20:30, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the in depth investigation of the portal by the nominator. This portal was created and immediately dumped, and has not been maintained. Having no maintainers and almost no readers is a clear failing of WP:POG, and the fact that Territories of the United States and Template:United States political divisions better transmit what this portal tried to show means it's not needed. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:16, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete for lack of significant edit history, although it's relatively harmless because it has no incoming links from mainspace (for now). Nemo 07:42, 7 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.