Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Edmonton

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. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:04, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Edmonton (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Undeveloped micro-portal on a narrow topic, the Canadian city of Edmonton. Created in 2007, 3 subpages added in 2016, no new content since then. Low pageviews (9 per day in Jan,–June 2019), and redundant to the GA-class head article Edmonton.

Portal created in April 2007‎ JayzRaptorz (talk · contribs), who last edited in 2008. The sub-pages were added in 2009 and 2016 by Kyle1278 (talk · contribs)/Kyle1278-2 (talk · contribs). However, after 12½ years there is a very slim set.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Edmonton shows:

• Portal:Edmonton/Did you know lists 7 items, added between 2009 and 2016. However, none of them appears to be related to WP:DYK, so they are just a bunch of WP:TRIVIA which misappropriates the good name of the scrutinised process at WP:DYK. Note that the page history shows some disagreement about the accuracy of the facts asserted.
• Portal:Edmonton/History is a static page created in 2010, with no textual updates since 2010. It's just a 9-yo, unsourced fork of History of Edmonton.
• Portal:Edmonton/Edmonton news consist solely of a link: https://news.google.ca/news/explore/section/q/Edmonton. Readers can do their own simple Google searches, and don't need a portal to spoonfeed it to them
• Portal:Edmonton/Selected picture shows a single picture, with no rotation or selection of image. Since the page's creation in 2007, it has shown a panorama of the city, although there have been about 4 changes in selection of the image file used. In 12 years, nobody has bothered to create an actual image gallery.
• Portal:Edmonton/Selected biography is single biog. The topic appears to have been changed about 3 times since the pages's creation in 2007. WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this page has missed over 140 updates.
• Portal:Edmonton/Article/1, /2 and /3 were all created in 2016. The only one of the three to have bene changed since 2016 is /2, which as ad soe minor tweaks.

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. Repeated evidence of many dozens of portals examined at MFD over the last 6 months that a city of less than a million is almost always not a broad enough topic to sustain a portal.
2. Low readership. The portal's daily average of only 9 views day in Jan–June 2019 is trivially low. By contrast, the head article Edmonton got 1,838 daily views in the same period.
3. Lack of maintainers. This portal has not been completely abandoned, but it has been severely neglected, and it falls well short of the "large numbers" of maintainers required by WP:POG.

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 the head article Istanbul, 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 Istanbul, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of over 30 images. It's a vastly better image gallery than the portal's lone, static picture.

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 2007, it is now clear that readers don't want to read it, and editors don't want to maintain it. It is a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:52, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

• Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator, BrownHairedGirl. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat with no benefit for readers. I am strongly against allowing recreation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Edmonton is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 14:54, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
• Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. Only four articles, last tweaked in 2016, which is even less coverage than most portals, and the usual poor view rate at 9 pageviews. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:11, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
• Delete cities should not have a portal.Catfurball (talk) 16:11, 17 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.