Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Shanghai

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. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:45, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Shanghai[edit]

Mini-portal on the city of Shanghai, in China. Abandoned since creation in 2011, and redundant to the head article Shanghai and its excellent navbox Template:Shanghai.

Created[1] in May 2011‎‎ by‎‎ WhisperToMe (talk · contribs).

In February 2019‎ it was converted[2] by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to an automated format which drew its "selected articles" lsit solely from the navbox Template:Shanghai, of which it therefore became a bloated and redundant content fork. (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 May 2019 I reverted[3] it to the last non-automated version.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Shanghahi shows a modest set of sub-pages:

Portal:Shanghai/Did you know lits the same 4 items as in 2011 . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
5 selected articles, all displaying the same topic as when created in 2011
5 selected articles, all except /5 displaying the same topic as when created in 2011

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this set of 10 articles displayed one at a time is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Shanghai and its excellent navbox Template:Shanghai..

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).

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 Template:Shanghai, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
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 Shanghai, 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 7 years, and it has abysmal page views. In Jan–Feb 2019 it got an average of only 13 daily views, which is a tiny 0.32% of the 4,032 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 8 years, this still has only 10 articles, 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 8-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) 13:19, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Concur with the analysis by BHG: 10 articles, 13 daily pageviews, 8 years neglect. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:23, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I don't think there's actually a valid deletion rationale in the above:

Shanghai is one of the largest cities in the world, List of urban areas by population puts it sixth with a population of 22 million. It is therefore a broad topic.
WP:POG doesn't say that portals must link to at least 20 articles, it says there should be at least 20 articles which are eligible for the portal. There are.
I don't see anything in WP:POG which says that portals have to be updated regularly. It does say that updating them regularly is a good idea, and update frequency is being discussed at the moment, but that doesn't mean the fact a portal hasn't been updated in a while should be deleted for that reason. You can suggest that as an amendment to the guideline, but MfD isn't the way to do that.
The argument that the main article serves the function of a portal better than the portal sounds to me like an argument against the existence of portals in general. There is a general consensus not to get rid of portals, so per WP:CONLIMITED we can't decide the opposite in an MfD. Furthermore the argument isn't entirely correct in that some of the selected articles are not linked from Shanghai.

Sure, it's not a very good portal, but that isn't in itself a reason to delete it. Hut 8.5 16:23, 9 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) 11:42, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Shanghai may have a large population, but it doesn't pass "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract ... portal maintainers". Shanghai doesn't have it's own wikiproject (and the China/Cities wikiprojects aren't very active judging by their talk pages) so it's very unlikely that there will be someone with the interest and knowledge to maintain the portal (that currently has redlinks). DexDor^(talk) 18:07, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Per nom. Another portal that has been essentially dead since creation bar some housekeeping by the The Transhumanist in 2018. Fails WP:POG in being too narrow a subject; it adds nothing over the main article. Essentially an out-of-date cut-and-past of the main article+nav box content. No point in this. Britishfinance (talk) 12:00, 17 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.