Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Karachi

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) 09:03, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Karachi[edit]

This portal had an average of daily 9 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019. It had little maintenance to its 15 article since 2008.

The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:52, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - This table compares remaining city portals in Pakistan against Portal:Pakistan. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:52, 20 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Pakistani City Portals[edit]

Title	Portal Page Views	Article Page Views	Comments	Baseline	Percent	Articles	Notes	Parent Portal	Type	Deleted
Pakistan	68	15328	Originator edits sporadically, last July 2019. Originated 2009. Article has weird peak of 82224 accesses on 27 Feb. Articles expanded to 36 on 2 Sept 2019.	Jan19-Jun19	0.44%	36	Jan19-Feb19 pageviews were 74/17889.	Asia	Country	Off
Karachi	9	2281	Originated 2008 by sporadic editor who last edited July 2019. Little or no maintenance on articles since 2008 (as of Oct2019).	Jan19-Jun19	0.39%	15		Pakistan	City	Off
Lahore	8	1955	Originated 2009 by sporadic editor whose last edit was July 2019. Articles tweaked but not otherwise changed since 2009. No content maintenance between 2009 and Oct2019.	Jan19-Jun19	0.41%	17		Pakistan	City	Off

Karachi[edit]

User:BrownHairedGirl - Moving the backlinks to Portal:Pakistan may be in order. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:39, 19 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:Pakistan), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:50, 19 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nominator, and per Robert McClenon. Single-city portal, too long neglected, and it has never had support from a WikiProject.

This is a portal about a single city. It is a very large city (population >14 million, 5th largest city in the world), but the history of the last 7 months of portals MFDs has shown it is rare for a portal even on a very large city to sustain the interest of readers and editors. The four cities with a larger population than Karachi have each failed to sustain a portal: See MFD:Portal:Chongqing, MFD:Portal:Shanghai, MFD:Portal:Beijing and MFD:Portal:Istanbul. Only ~~two~~one of the top cities by population has an eponymous portal: ~~Portal:Moscow and~~ Portal:Tokyo.

The portal was never properly built, and it has basically been abandoned since construction was halted. It has only 15 selected articles (and no separate set of biogs), which is less than even the risibly low bare minimum of 20 set by the former guideline WP:POG. All those pages were created in 2008, since when they have had only trivial technical changes, such as punctuation and disambiguation.

Portal:Karachi/News was changed in January 2019‎ to automatically update, having previously been displaying the same content for four years[1] However, the narrowness of the topic means that even with its generous setting of 200 days scope, it produces only one news item, a storm warning. So it adds little value.

There is no sign of any active maintainers, and Portal talk:Karachi has had zero posts by humans in the ten years since its creation, apart from a 2018 mass message by User:The Transhumanist (TTH).

Similarly, WP:WikiProject Karachi is not interested. I tagged[2] the project as {{WikiProject status|Inactive}}, per Template:WikiProject_status#Usage:_Inactive_projects, because the last post on its talk page was in May 2018; the last discussion (where one human editor responded to another human) was in 2011. I examined WT:WikiProject Karachi and in the ten years since the page was created, the only post mentioning the word "portal" is another mass message from TTH. I checked whatlinkshere in the Wikipedia talk namespace, and there is no link to it from any other WikiProject's talk page.

And in January–June 2019, the portal averaged only 9 views/day, which is barely above background noise.

So, is summary, we have: a barely started portal, long neglected, on a type of topic which rarely sustains a portal, with no maintainers and an inactive WikiProject which has never expressed any interest in the portal. It should have been deleted years ago. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:06, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete we don't need city portals period.Catfurball (talk) 21:13, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Per nom and arguments of BHG and RMcC above. Britishfinance (talk) 12:52, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Störm (talk) 15:10, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per RMcC and BHG, 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) 05:42, 27 October 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.