Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Shenzhen

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 23:23, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Shenzhen

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

Static mini-portal on the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Abandoned since 2016, with no list of topics, and no rotation of topics ... and for the last two years, it gave pride of place to a "selected article" about a suburb in England.

Created[1] in February 2016‎ by Wishva de Silva (talk · contribs).

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

• Portal:Shenzhen/Selected article/1. Created in 2016 with the topic Ping An Finance Centre, it was hijacked[2] in 2017 by Williamtom2 (talk · contribs) for the topic of Forge Wood, a suburb of the English town of Crawley. I reverted that[3] today ... but note that the portal was so abandoned that nobody else fixed it in the last two years
• Portal:Shenzhen/Selected picture/1. Same image (File:Chiwan Tianhou Temple 20140515.JPG) since creation in 2016[4]
• Portal:Shenzhen/Selected picture/2. Same image (File:Dapeng Fortress 3.jpg) since creation in 2016[5]
• Portal:Shenzhen/Did you know/1. Same one item (Qianhai) since 2016. And as far as I can see, it never appeared in WP:DYK.

WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed 40 consecutive updates.

In theory, this 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". In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 13 pageviews per day, which is right at the median of 13 per day for all portals, but only 0.4% of the 3,097 daily views of the head article. And it has consistently failed to attract maintainers.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Shenzhen and its navbox Template:Shenzhen.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox 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 this link to Template:Shenzhen.
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 the article Shenzhen.

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

That sets a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle that "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 Shenzhen with its navbox {{Shenzhen}}.

But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and 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) 15:17, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

• Delete as per analysis by BHG, and as per observation that big city portals do not attract large numbers of interested readers, and especially noting that vandalism went unnoticed for an extended period. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:57, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per WP:PORTAL's maintenance requirement. SITH (talk) 11:39, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
• Delete - as bad as the previous one. Pldx1 (talk) 14:04, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

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.