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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bremen

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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) 10:43, 2 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Bremen[edit]

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

Long-neglected mini-portal on a narrow topic, with content-forked sub-pages, no active maintainers, no WikiProject interest, and trivial readership levels. (An average of only 6 views per day in January–June 2019, which is barely above background noise.)

The portal topic is Bremen (state), which is a city state of Germany. It's the smallest German state by both population and land area, with a 2017 population of only 681,000. It is rare for geographical portals of areas this small to be sustainably viable, i.e. to attract enough readers and editors to avoid rotting. Over the last seven months of portal MFDs, dozens of such portals have been deleted because they are similarly neglected. In this case, per the evidence below, there is also not enough quality content.

The portal was created[1] in December 2016‎ by Niet-0-leuk (talk · contribs), who also created 5 selected article pages and 3 selected biographies. In March 2108, Niet-0-leuk added Portal:Bremen/Selected article/6.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Bremen shows a v small set of sub-pages:

There is no news section and no DYKs. (Probably no great loss; with such a narrow topic, there would be little to fill them).

The image gallery has less than a quarter of the 18 images in the head article on the city of Bremen. Those images are available to logged-out readers (i.e. the vast majority of readers) as a full-screen slideshow. Try it yourself by right-clicking on this link to Bremen, selecting "open in private window" or "open in incognito window", and then click on any image. That full-screen gallery is vastly better than the tiny set of images on the portal, which displays its set only one-at-time, and requires the readers to purge the page to see another from the set.

The set of only 9 articles is less than half the risibly low minimum of 20 set by the former guideline WP:POG. It includes no recognised content (i.e. FA-class or GA-class), and there is little scope for doing so because few such articles exist. I used AWB to generate a list of all 2,520 articles in Category:Bremen (state)+subcats, and compared that with a combined list of the 874 +Category:GA-Class Germany articles. The intersection list (see WT:MFD:P:Bremen#Recognised content has 87 pages, but 81 are ships built in Bremen, 3 are Kings of Great Britain, and two are wives thereof (Caroline of Ansbach and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, included since they were titular Duchesses of Bremen and Verden).

There also few B-class articles. Using the same AWB methods, I made a list of the 29 B-class Bremen articles (see WT:MMFD:P:Bremen#B-class). It has only 29 articles, of which 25 are ships. That leaves only 4 non-ship articles.

Unless the portal was to be stuffed full of ships and British royals, that leaves only one FA/GA-class article (the footballer Bert Trautmann) and 4 B-class.

The portal is also unmaintained. Niet-0-leuk's last edit to any part of it was in March 2018 (see Niet-0-leuk's portal-space contribs). In July 2018, @Dreamy Jazz used WP:AWB to identify Bermicourt (talk · contribs) as a maiantainer.[2] There is no indication of whether Bermicourt had requested this, but while I assume that Dreamy Jazz acted in good faith, there is no sign that Bermicourt is doing any significant maintenance. 15 months later, the portal still has only 9 articles (5 of them merely start-class), and Bermicourt's only edit to the portal since then was in Dec 2018,[3] when Bermicourt changed the date on the {{Portal maintenance status}} from June 2018 to Dec 2018. This is surprising, because Template:Portal maintenance status/doc says that the date is for |date= Date of last template update, but there was no other chnage to the template and the portal's revision history shows only trivial technical changes in the preceding months.

There is also no sign of support from any topical WikiProject. Whatlinkshere from the Wikipedia Talk namespace shows only one mention: a 2015 comment in WP:GERMANY that it is one of two "missing" German state portals. There was no response, and no indication that the project wanted such portals. There has been no mention of the portal since then on any project talk page. The portal also gets no mention on any article talk page, or on any user talk page.

This portal's narrow scope measn that it should never have been created. The lack of interest from maintainers, WikiProjects and readers give no basis for sustaining it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:28, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Germany), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:33, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. There is a much better and more useful portal for this major city-state on German Wikipedia. Bermicourt (talk) 17:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Bermicourt, look at the population size. With only 24% of the population of Greater Manchester, 51% of the population of County Dublin, or it's not exactly a major city-state. It's actually the smallest of Germany's three city-states.
A portal on this topic may be viable on de.wp, where there are more and higher-quality articles, and probably some maintainers who role is more than nominal. But this is not de.wp. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:07, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Per nom. Britishfinance (talk) 17:27, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Portal:Bremen had 6 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, which is no more than noise based on the research of User:BrownHairedGirl. By contrast, the head article had |293 daily pageviews (not always enough to support a portal).
    • The absence of a DYK section is not a disadvantage. Portal DYK sections very seldom meet the criteria for Main Page Did You Know, and are usually an excuse to provide general trivia.
    • As noted by BHG, no maintenance on the articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:56, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment for those interested, I added the maintainer(s) to portals based on the "Specific portal maintainers" list (which can be found here). Bermicourt is listed as the "lead editor" for most German state portals on en.wp, including this portal. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 23:16, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as per analysis by BHG and as per my comments. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:16, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete this state doesn't need a portal.Catfurball (talk) 18:19, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per BHG's analysis, and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the poor condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Portals are not content, like an article is, since they are for navigation instead. It is therefore improper to use rationales meant for keeping articles to argue that this failed navigation device should be kept. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised or done at the last minute just to stave off deletion. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. The community's consensus not to delete all portals is not a consensus to keep all portals; instead they are to be evaluated individually, as is being done here. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve old and inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 04:57, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the highly detailed and thorough investigation of the portal by the nominator, @BrownHairedGirl. The portal fails on all points (readership, maintenance, scope, etc.) and its only listed maintainer, Bermicourt, doesn't think it should be kept either. Newshunter12 (talk) 08:13, 1 November 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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