Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Palatine Uplands

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: moot. The portal has been moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Portal:North Palatine Uplands by its creator User:Bermicourt. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:07, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:North Palatine Uplands[edit]

Neglected portal on a narrow topic, the North Palatine Uplands, which is a region of the German state Rhineland-Palatinate. Trivially low pageviews (5/day). No WikiProject interest. Narrow scope and lack of quality content means that its showcase appears to include no FA-class or GA-class articles. There is not even a Category:North Palatine Uplands

Portal created [1] in 2017 by @Bermicourt, who has pioneered on en.wp the "mega-navbox" style of portal. This uses extensive navbox-like lists of articles to provide direct access to lots of them, complete with the built-in previews available to non-logged-in readers on all en.wp pages. It's vastly more usable than the predominant but hideous one-subpage-at-a-time model. Sadly, readers seem no more interested in this type than in the subpage portals, so In Jan–Jun 2019 this portal averaged only 5 views per day, which is barely above background noise.

The narrowness of the topic means means that even the use of the mega-navbox format leaves it with only a small set of links. The whole thing would make one modestly large navbox, which would be of far more use to readers because the navbox should be on every page in its set, saving the need to vist a separate portal page.

The "Good articles" section includes only 4 articles, all of which are actually start-class on en.wp, but GA-class or FA-class on de.wp. That list may be handy for editors, but it's not fair on readers to have a section headed "Good articles" which actually contains only start-class.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:North Palatine Uplands shows only 3 subpages, because this superior design doesn't employ the common (but vastly inferior) model of a forest of content-forked sub-pages. However, I note that all are unchanged since 2017, apart from a minor tweak to Portal:North Palatine Uplands/New Articles.

There is no WP:WikiProject North Palatine Uplands to assess articles within its scope, nor even a WP:WikiProject Rhineland-Palatinate, and no other project seems interested. WhatLinksHere in Wikipedia talsk namespace shows only one mention this portal: WT:WikiProject Germany/Archive_22#Portals, where Bermicourt announced its creation. The only link to this portal from any user talk page is from one my talk archives, and there are no links from any article talk pages. There seems to be no interest in this portal other than from its creator.

The experience of 7 months of MFDs scrutinising many hundreds of portals has shown that there are even many countries which don't make viable portals, and sub-national regions rarely thrive as portals. Despite en.wp's huge systemic bias towards American topics, even many states of the United States had portals which failed (22 of the 50 sttae portals have already been deleted). The North Palatine Uplands is a sparsely-populated sub-sub-national region, so it's unsurprising that it failed to attract readers or editors.

This portal is a relic of a phase of portal creation when insufficient attention was paid to the repeated failure of poartals on narrow topics. I am sure that it was created in good faith, but on closer scrutiny it's clear that it fails all the key tests of a portal: it has a narrow topic, little content, almost no interest from readers, and no WikiProject support. Time to delete it. And since the problems are structural, I oppose re-creation.

Alternatively, the poral could be moved to project space. In some MFDs of similar portals, Bermicourt has indicated a preference for doing so, and if this portal could be of assistance to editors, then that woukd be a good solution. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:08, 24 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:Rhineland-Palatinate), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:11, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, overly narrow topic with zero growth potential, not attracting any semblance of attention. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 03:22, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Per nom. This is however a very useful mid-sized Navbox that should be recreated as a Navbox; and by adding sun Navbox to the relevant listed articles, will be more likely to be maintained/kept up-to-date (rather than being hidden in a portal that nobody is accessing). I would do myself but am away and only on mobiles. Britishfinance (talk) 15:28, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - This is a toy portal by a creator of toy portals. It had an average of |5 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019. Interestingly, the head article had even fewer daily pageviews at |3 daily pageviews of the article, which suggests that the article does not support a portal. The portal has already been moved to a subpage of WikiProject Germany. While this is probably the right outcome, it was in direct violation of the notice on the MFD banner, which says: "You are welcome to edit this page, but please do not blank, merge, or move it, or remove this notice, while the discussion is in progress." Moving a page is one way of moving it. Moving a page that is under MFD discussion causes the link back from the page to the MFD to be broken, and has other annoying effects. I think that I have redirected the link properly now. Since the portal has been moved, I suggest that the MFD be closed as an Ignore All Rules resolution. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:58, 24 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.