Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Sarawak

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) 03:50, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Sarawak[edit]

(Time stamp for bot to properly relist.) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:04, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Non-portal on the Malaysian state of Sarawak, abandoned from 2013 to 2018, when it was converted into an automated navbox clone. So it's now just a redundant fork.

Created[1] in July 2013‎ by Omdo (talk · contribs), who has been indef-blocked since the end of July 2013.[2]

Using the old system of multiple sub-pages, it never had any substantive sub-pages for articles, or any lists of links beyond the navbox {{Sarawak}}. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal: is unusually sparse, with several pictures but no content.

In August 2018 it was converted[3] by @The Transhumanist (TTH) into an automated portal, drawing its list of "selected articles" solely from the navbox {{Sarawak}}, and its images solely from the head article Sarawak.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the the functionality which this portal sets out to offer is already built in to the head article. 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).

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 on e.g. Template:Sarawak.
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 the article Sarawak.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

In theory, this state of 2.6 million people might be seen as a broad topic. But in practice, it has not met the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This has not attracted maintainers for 6 years, and in Jan–Feb 2019 got only 2 pageviews per day.

But the new technologies set a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". It would take a lot of work to make a portal which genuinely offers more than the head article Sarawak with its navbox {{Sarawak}}.

But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and find a team of editors to maintain it ... 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) 09:26, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - As BHG notes. This is a little-viewed portal even as little-viewed portals go at 2 daily pageviews. (By contrast, the head article about the state has 784 daily pageviews.) The author of this portal is not maintaining it because they were blocked for copyvio, which is a slightly different version of a common situation. (More portal-creators have been blocked or banned either for sockpuppetry or for battleground editing. But blocked editors can't maintain portals, and can't canvass for portal maintainers.) Robert McClenon (talk) 17:38, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:04, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 16 subpages, created 2013-07-14 05:16:36 by User:Omdo. Never went alive. Already nuked by TTH. The replacement by forking a navbox is not better. Portal:Sarawak. Pldx1 (talk) 12:28, 29 May 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.