Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Uranus

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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) 23:49, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Uranus


This is another under-implemented, undermaintained, underviewed portal.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Uranus shows 9 12 articles, 3 biographies, and 9 pictures, short of the provision in the portal guidelines for 20 articles. (Biographies are articles. Pictures are not; they are images.)  Two of the articles were added in 2014. There has been no apparent maintenance since 2014. During January 2019-February 2019*, there were 14 daily pageviews, which is less than half of a percent of the 3861 daily pageviews of the article in the same period. (*Note: User:BrownHairedGirl has recently changed the usual baseline period for statistics on viewing from January 2019-February 2019 to January 2019-July 2019. I am following her lead but am keeping data that has been collected using the older baseline.)  Some portals have subjects that are thousands of kilometers, typically not more than 20000 km, from some editors and so may be close to other editors. The subject of this portal is billions of kilometers from all known editors. The following portals are literally out of this world:

This portal, Portal:Uranus, does not provide any value added beyond what is provided by the lead article Uranus and by categories and links and via Template:Uranus.

Some editors have suggested that portals should be required for countries, and for states of the United States (and so possibly for states/provinces of Australia, Canada, and India). Should portals also be required for worlds? On the other hand, does Wikipedia is not compulsory mean that we do not Wait for Portal Maintainers, who may show up when Godot comes onto the stage? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:58, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. Actually 12 articles. It is not difficult to expand this number. Ruslik_ Zero 19:46, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment to User:Ruslik0 - Biographies are articles, so that is 12+3 = 15. Maybe it may not be difficult to expand on the number of articles, but I can only count the articles that exist, not the articles that might exist in August.  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:42, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. The nominator's analysis is correct: this is a long-abandoned, and almost unused portal.  It is redundant to the head article Uranus, which in the first 6 months of this year got 263 times more views than the portal. (670,983 article views / 2,547 portal views).
 * These sort of numbers can be hard to grasp, so try a few analogies:
 * For every reader who viewed the portal, five coachloads viewed the article
 * the article got as many pageviews as there are people in Detroit. The portal got as many views as there are people in the tiny Edenville Township, Michigan.
 * Uranus pageviews Jan-June 2019.png look at a chart of the pageviews. The portal's 0.38% share is so miniscule that it's barely visible
 * The 15 articles in the portal are all displayed by unsourced content forks. 73% of them are ten-years old:
 * 11 of the subpages were created in 2009. Since then, none has had anything other than drive-by minor edits: article/1, article/2, article/3, article/4, article/5, article/6, article/7, article/8, biog/1, biography/2 and  biography/3
 * 2 of the subpages were created in 2011. Since then, neither  has had anything other than drive-by minor edits: article/9 and article/10
 * 2 of the subpages were created in 2014. Since then, neither  has had anything other than drive-by minor edits: article/11 and article/12
 * So this is a set of mostly 10-year-old unsourced content forks, whose readership is tiny that if we round off its % share to whole numbers, the result is 0%. Yes, zero percent.
 * The lead of WP:POG says "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create", but in this case the creator hasn't touched any part of it since this edit in February 2011.
 * WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so the creator is entitled to move on to other interests. But Wikipedia has no reason to keep this abandoned and unused annex. 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 portal has attracted no maintainers and no readers. Time to just delete it. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The number 0.38% does not tell me much. How do it compare to other portals? Ruslik_ Zero 08:46, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
 * @Ruslik, the overwhelming majority of portals I have checked are in a range from 1% to 0.05%, i.e the head article gets between 100 and 2,000 more views than the portal. This one is near the middle of that range. But in absolute numbers, this one is below even the abymsal median of 17 views/day for all current portals.
 * Narrow topic portals as a set have failed, tho per WP:POG they should never have been created in the first place. That's why, for the last few months, MFD debates has repeatedly deleted the weaker narrow-topic portals, like this one.
 * Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors.  A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article.  And in this case, the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Uranus and its navbox.
 * 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).
 * 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:Uranus, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * 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 Uranus, 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 it 2009, the evidence ten years later is that is a failed solution to a non-problem. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 10:44, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. I actually do not object to deletion of planets' portals. Portal:Solar System can serve this topic well without them. Ruslik_ Zero 21:04, 17 July 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.