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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Railways in Pakistan

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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. — xaosflux Talk 16:04, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Railways in Pakistan (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Abandoned mini-portal, redundant to the head article Pakistan Railways and its navbox Template:Pakistan Railways.

Created[1] in June 2018‎ by Altitude.pk (talk · contribs), whose has made a total of 56 edits, all in 7 days in June 2016, nearly all of them to this portal.

This an old-style portal with sub-pages. The list at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Railways in Pakistan shows a modest set of pages:

  • 2 Selected articles
  • 1 Selected bridge or tunnel
  • 1 Selected photo
  • 2 Selected routes
  • 1 Selected station

So there is almost no rotation of content. And the route pages Portal:Railways in Pakistan/Selected route/1 & Portal:Railways in Pakistan/Selected route/2 don't even have a link to the head article. The Selected photo is unused, because the portal takes its list of images from head article.

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 Pakistan Railways and its navbox Template:Pakistan Railways.

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).

  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:Pakistan Railways.
  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 this link to the article Pakistan Railways.

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

WP:POG guides that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This could in theory be viewed as a broad topic. But in practice it has not attracted maintainers, and in Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 11 pageviews per day, compared with 422 viees per day for the head aricle Pakistan Railways.

It is theoretically possible to build a portal which would actually add value for readers, and theoretically possible that they might pay attention to the first para of WP:POG which asks editors not to create a portals unless they are willing to maintain it. And it's also theoretically possible that such a portal might have editors who do the ongoing work of maintaining it. But meanwhile, this unfinished portals just wastes the time of readers.

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) 21:13, 21 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.