Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Venice

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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. — xaosflux  Talk 23:23, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Venice


Static mini-portal on the city of Venice. Abandoned since 2010, with no list of topics, and no rotation of topics.

Created in January 2010‎ by, whose last edit was in 2013.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Venice shows only a few sub-pages:
 * Portal:Venice/Selected article. Same topic (Ca' d'Oro) since 2010
 * Portal:Venice/Selected picture.  Same picture (File:BasilicaSanMarcoNighttime.jpg) since 2010
 * Portal:Venice/Did you know. Not a collection of WP:DYKs, just an unsourced 140-word para asking "Did you know that Venice used to be a Republic?".  Same text 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". In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 8 pageviews per day, which is little over half the abysmal median of 13 per day for all portals, but still only 0.21% of the 3,900 daily views of the head article. And 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 Venice.

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 the article Venice
 * 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 Venice, nad then click on any image.

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 Venice.

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) 14:01, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG, and noting that big city portals do not attract large numbers of interested readers. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:54, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: I really love Venice, I like the idea of portals, but this is just poorly executed due to lack of maintenance.   SITH   (talk)   11:40, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - as bad as the previous one. Pldx1 (talk) 14:05, 25 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.