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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) 07:22, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Boston[edit]

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

Abandoned-since-2015 mini-portal on the city of Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA. Redundant to the featured-class head article Boston and its navboxes Template:Boston, Massachusetts and Template:Boston landmarks.

Created[1] in February 2008‎‎ Avenged Eightfold (talk · contribs), whose last edit to any part of the portal was in later in February 2008[2] and who hasn't edit any part of en.wp since 2010.

In September 2018, the portal was converted[3] by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to an automated format which drew its "selected articles" list solely from the navbox Template:Boston and its image gallery solely from the head article Boston. That made it simply a bloated redundant fork of the head article. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).

In April 2019, @Northamerica1000 wisely restored[4] a non-automated version.

The leaves a static portal with a small set of subpages, listed at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Boston:

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this set of ten articles displayed one at a time is massively less useful in every respect than featured-class head article Boston and its navboxes Template:Boston, Massachusetts and Template:Boston landmarks.

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 either of these links to Template:Boston, Massachusetts and Template:Boston landmarks, 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 Boston, 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:

  • WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but this portals has been unmaintained for nine years, and it has abysmal page views. In Jan–Feb 2019 it got an average of only 18 pageviews per day, which a tiny 0.37% of the 4,860 daily views for the head article.
  • WP:POG#Article_selection requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But after ten years, this still has only 10 articles, just half of the bare minimum.

Maybe someday someone will build and maintain a portal which actually adds value for readers. But if so, they will do better to start afresh, rather than building on these 10-year-old content forks. And in the meantime, it's unfair to readers to lure them to this page which is simply a waste of their time.

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. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:34, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 29 subpages, created 2008-02-22 13:38:51 by User:Avenged Eightfold. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. Already nuked by TTH, for a reason, even if replacement by the fork of a navbox was not the thing to do. Portal:Boston. Pldx1 (talk) 12:29, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Since 60 percent of our readers dont see nav-templates anymore - ..perhaps someone could take the time to fix some of these that no one knows need updating.....or tag them needed updating and give the community time to look at them an notify the projects involved. Be a pillar not a wrecking ball --Moxy 🍁 15:29, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question for User:Moxy on "Be a pillar". Please explain how. I have seen standing pillars that have been standing for two thousand years with nothing above them, sixteen centuries longer than Boston. The pillars may have survived earthquake and the Vandals, but it hadn't taken a wrecking ball to level everything else. Do you want to build an empty monument? Robert McClenon (talk) 19:13, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - I concur with the analysis by BHG, and I don't see the need to leave a Roman ruin. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:13, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – In the absence of criteria WP: POG for cities and the exclusion of the parent portal Portal:Cities I understand that a portal about only one city is not a broad topic.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:11, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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.


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