Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Gujarat

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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. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:28, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Gujarat[edit]

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

Narrow topic, low-readership portal on the Indian state of Gujarat, with insufficient high-quality articles to make a viable portal. Abandoned from 2006 to 2018, when it was rebuilt without the wretched content-forked sub-pages (yay!). However, even after the rebuild, the selection is still too small and of poor quality. Lack of high-quality content and inactive WikiProject make improvement highly unlikely. The image gallery is just a clone-job.

Created [1] in September 2006‎ by Aksi great (talk · contribs), who made only 4 further edits to the portal after that month, the last in Jan 2007 (see Aksi great's portal-space contribs). The portal then had no rotation of topics, and relied on manual updates of Portal:Gujarat/Selected article, but the last of those was in October 2006‎. [2]

The portal remained stagnant, displaying the same static content for nearly 12 years. In late May 2018, Nizil Shah (talk · contribs) made a series of major edits [3], which converted the portal to a more modern format which automatically transcludes lead excerpts using {{Transclude random excerpt}}.

However, the selection is small and of poor quality. There are only 16 articles in all, under two headings:

Geography
  1. Ahmedabad — GA
  2. Sun temple, Modhera — C-class
  3. Bhuj — C-class
  4. Surat — C-class
  5. Rajkot — B-class
  6. Mehsana — start-class
  7. Champaner — start-class
  8. Junagadh — C-class
Biography
  1. Mahatma Gandhi — GA-class
  2. Vallabhbhai Patel — B-class
  3. Raghuveer Chaudhary — start-class
  4. Narmad — C-class
  5. Hemchandra — start-class
  6. Vallabhbhai Patel — B-class
  7. Narayan Desai — start-class
  8. Vanraj Chavda — C-class

That set of 16 articles is obviously better than the previous single article, but it still falls below the WP:POG minimum of 20. (Yes, I do know that after 6 months of specifying a bare minimum of twenty, POG was reverted to an earlier version which makes that a fuzzy target. But I hope that unlike the reverter, editors will exercise WP:COMMONSENSE and recognise that even 20 articles is a woefully small set to provide a decent sample of any non-trivial topic, and that a mere 16 is a waste of time. It's the size of a small navbox, and doesn't justify luring readers to a standalone page)

WP:POG#Article_selection requires that articles be "high quality, either a featured article, a good article or one which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively". But here we have no FAs, only 2 GAs, and 5 of the 16 are start-class.

That sort of result was kinda inevitable, because there isn't much to choose from. Category:WikiProject Gujarat articles lists only 3389 articles, and the table at Category:Gujarat articles by quality shows that few are high-quality. There's only one FA-class, 11 GA-Class, and one A-class. Even going down to B-class adds only 32 articles. That's too small a set to allow a list to achieve a reasonable balance of topics.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal".This fails on at least three of the four counts:

  1. ☒N Broad topic. Gujarat has a 2011 population of 60 million, so it's not a tiny place. However, as above en.wp coverage is thin, with only 12 GA/FA articles. The set here is too small to present a balanced set of topics without using much lower-grade articles, and making severe compromises on quality.
  2. ☒N High readership. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 12 views per day is trivially low.
  3. ☒N Lots of maintainers. No. See above. It's unclear whether Nizil Shah's 2018 work was a one-off, or whether they intend to be a regular maintainer of the portal. But even if they are, Nizil Shah is the only maintainer to appear in 13 years, and POG requires multiple maintainers.
  4. ☒N WikiProject involvement. No. WP:WikiProject Gujarat appears inactive, so I have just tagged it as inactive,[4]. The project shows zero interest in the portal: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gujarat has never been archived, and contains zero mentions of Portal:Gujarat.

I am sure that Nizil Shah's 2018 efforts were a diligent, good faith attempt to rescue a derelict portal. However, no amount of good faith or diligence applied to the portal can rescue the portal from the underlying problems that this is too narrow a topic, with too few quality articles to fill a portal, and to few interested editors to sustain it. It's time to just delete it. Since the problems are structural, I also oppose re-creation. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:38, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

delete. I agree with your assessment and logic. I had tried to rescue it in 2018 when portal deletion discussion resulted in new templates and tools to make it somewhat easy to maintain. There are very few active editors from Gujarat and are not organised enough to maintain it. So better delete it. I don't oppose re-creation because if in future there are enough editors to maintain it, it should be recreated. Regards,-Nizil (talk) 06:54, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks, Nizil. I'm glad that my analysis didn't come across as criticism of you. I tried to avoid that, but was unsure if I'd got it right.
It is theoretically possible that there might be some future influx of editors who will expand en.wps's limited high-quality coverage of Gujarat to a point where there is enough to make a portal becomes viable, and that some of those editors will want to help maintain the portal. But the chances look very remote, I'd prefer to say no re-creation, and leave anyone who wants to re-create it to open a DRV at which they can present the new evidence of circumstances having changed. Otherwise we risk having a lone enthusiast re-create the portal, which won't end well. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:28, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I understood your point. :) I oppose re-creation until some discussion is held to recreate it with enough people to handle it. Regards,-Nizil (talk) 07:35, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator, BrownHairedGirl. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a meaningless time suck that lures readers to a structurally deficient Bonsai portal that suffered an over decade long abandonment, and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as over a decade of hard evidence shows Gujarat is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or multiple maintainers, and the portal has fundamental structural deficiencies. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:34, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Indian Portals[edit]
Title Portal Page Views Article Page Views Percent Comments Articles Notes Baseline Deleted Type
Haryana 9 2469 0.36% Originated 2012. Originator last edited 2018. No maintenance after 2013. 12 Jan19-Jun19 FALSE State
Assam 10 2679 0.37% Originated 2013. Originator last edited portal in 2016, inactive since 2017. Very little maintenance since 2013. 12 Article 7 has had markup error since 2013. Jan19-Jun19 FALSE State
Bihar 10 2935 0.34% Originated 2008. Abandoned by originator, who last edited 2015. No substantive maintenance since 2013. 16 Jan19-Jun19 FALSE State
Gujarat 12 3471 0.35% Originated in 2006 and abandoned. Originator inactive since 2011. Articles are listed in-line rather than forked. 16 Jan19-Jun19 FALSE State
West Bengal 14 3531 0.40% Originated 2006, updated until 2008 by editor who edits occasionally. Some articles have been converted to transclusion but others have not; maintenance is spotty. 26 A tangled forest of subpages. Jan19-Jun19 FALSE State
India 145 30677 0.47% Very many subpages, some of which are marked historical. Difficult to determine when last maintained. 94 Jan-Feb19 views were 150/32278 Jan19-Feb19 FALSE Country
Gujarat[edit]
  • Delete as per analysis by BHG. Conversion of articles from content-forked subpages to transclusion is an improvement that reduces the need for maintenance but does not eliminate it, and there is no maintenance of too few articles that are read too little. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:35, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete this portal is worthless.Catfurball (talk) 23:27, 17 September 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:India), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:59, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete with thanks to Nizil for their efforts, which I think help model how to put together a good portal, while also modeling the inevitable consequences if the portal topic is not broad enough. It seems akin to trying to write an article on a non-notable topic. – Levivich 05:57, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete and oppose re-creation per all above. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:47, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Another abandoned portal, topic too narrow.--Darwinek (talk) 22:37, 24 September 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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