Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:West Bengal

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 02:32, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:West Bengal

 * – (View MfD)

Abandoned portal on the Indian state of West Bengal, with low pageviews (14/day). Was intensively curated from 2006 to 2008, and was sloppily awarded Featured portals status in 2007. The WP:WikiProject West Bengal lost interest in it thereafter, and it has been abandoned since.
 * Summary

Now it is a huge forest of eleven-year-old content forks, which was so dire that it was automated by TTH. The automation was rightly reverted, so it remains an abandoned relic which fails at least 3 of WP:POG's 4 key tests.


 * History and analysis

The portal was created in October 2006‎ by, who did significant maintenance on it until 22 May 2008, mostly adding new DYKs (see Dwaipayanc's portal-space contribs). Many of the selected articles/biogs/pics were added by, whose last edit to the portal was on 16 January 2008 (see Riana's portal-space contribs).

The Featured portals status was awarded in March 2007 after this review. At the time, the portal was in fairly good shape by the standards of the time, but the review is unimpressive reading: there isn't even a checklist of criteria, and most of the discussion is about colours and minor points of formatting. 12 years later, the portal is in a dire state, but the FP process has been discontinued, so there is no way of holding a new review to remove the star from the top right of the portal.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:West Bengal shows several screenfulls of pages, but the numbers are a bit misleading. Over half of the pages are DYK archives, and about a third of the selected articles/biogs/pics are blanks. Here's the breakdown: /1 to /9 were both converted in 2018 by to use Transclude lead excerpt, so they always use the current version of the article. However, since 2008, /2, /4, /5, /6, /7] and /8 have all had only technical edits such as disambiguation or image updating. The only textual edit is this trivial one to /3. It appears that there was a hectic rush to create new sub-pages before the FP candidacy, and that those involved gave up afterwards.
 * Portal:West Bengal/Did you know, and sub-pages /1 to /133. And no gaps. It seems that the way Dwaipayanc worked was to create a new archive page for the old item whenever a new one was added. The last additions were in 2008, so these are all stale. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but eleven-year-old items lose the newness, so their only effect is as a trivia section.  The sample I have checked are all genuine DYKs unlike the fakes which adorn so many other portals, but  facts asserted accurately may no longer be true after a decade, and all these items are presented without a date, so the reader has no warning of their age.
 * Portal:West Bengal/News displays one item, dated "June 18". However the linked news report is dated June 2009, and there is no warning to the reader that this "news" is from a decade ago.
 * Portal:West Bengal/Selected articles has sub-pages /1 to /9, all created in early 2007. (/10, /11, /12 & /13 are blanks).
 * Portal:West Bengal/Selected biography has sub-pages 1 to 17. (/18, /19 and /20 are all blank). All 17 were created in 2007, and none of them has been converted to automatic excerpt. I have examined all 17, and can find only one non-technical edit since 2008: a minor tweak to /11.

So all those screenfulls amount to two self-updating pages, and a massive set of stale content forks which are more than a decade old. There is almost nothing here worth keeping ... which is presumably why in February 2019‎ @The Transhumanist (TTH) "restarted" the portal as an automated page which drew its "selected articles" list soley from Template:West Bengal topics. That made the portal just a bloated version of the navbox, just like TTH's navbox-clone portalspam which was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two). So in May 2019‎, I (BHG) reverted the automation, and restored the last curated version.

Four months after that de-automation, it's unchanged: still a sea of decade-long rot.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This fails on at least three of the four counts:
 * Assessment
 * 1)  Broad topic . Borderline. West Bengal had a 2011 population of 91 million, so it's not a tiny place.  However, high quality en.wp coverage is thin, with only 22 GA/FA articles (see table at Category:West Bengal articles by quality). That set is too small to present a balanced set of topics without using lower-grade articles, and making compromises on quality, though with 82 B-class articles, the compromise might not be too big.
 * 2)  High readership .  No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 14 views per day is trivially low.
 * 3)  Lots of maintainers . No.  See detailed analysis above; with minor exceptions, maintenance ended in 2008. The last human post on the Portal's talk page was a question about maps in 2007.  The only posts since then are a pair of AWB-driven notifications.
 * 4)  WikiProject involvement . No. WP:WikiProject West Bengal is active, but the last mention on its talk page of Portal:West Bengal was the February 2007 announcement of the featured portal candidacy.

This portal is relic of a rush of portal-mania in the years when editor numbers were at their peak, and were often assumed (wrongly) to be ever-growing. But for the last decade, with fewer editors, there has been no interest in maintaining a portal on this topic, and almost no interest in reading it. Time to just delete it. And since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:31, 17 September 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 stale one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to an over decade-long abandoned portal and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as over a decade of hard evidence shows West Bengal is not a broad enough topic per WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:36, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Indian Portals

 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. The subpage structure is a tangled forest, like the flora of parts of West Bengal.  There are still some content forks that are not being maintained.  Low readership.  Robert McClenon (talk) 17:40, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal is worthless.Catfurball (talk) 23:26, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete and oppose re-creation per analysis by BrownHairedGirl. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:21, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Another abandoned and not well-maintained portal.--Darwinek (talk) 22:35, 24 September 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.