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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Baptists

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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) 04:47, 11 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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

Abandoned mini-portal with only 5 selected biogs and 5 selected articles.

Portal:Baptists/News has two items:

The first story is from 2008. The second is from 2005. And they call this "news"?

Examining the list at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Baptists shows that all these subpages were created in 2009, and have had no change of topic since. In 2018, some of them were wisely converted to automatically excerpt the lead of the relevant articles rather than using old content forks ... but while this is a valuable change, the size of the selction is far too small to meet the WP:PORTAL core principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". This is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Baptists and its sidebar navbox Template:Baptist.

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:Baptist, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
  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 Baptists, 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 portals 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 in practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers, and it has also been shunned by readers: in Jan–Feb 2019, under its then title Portal:Baptist the portal got only 13 page views per day, while the head article Baptists got 1,696 daily views.
  • WP:POG#Article_selection requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But after ten years, has only 10 articles, a mere half of the bare minimum.

Portal talk:Baptists has two non-bot posts: one from 2009, the other from 2010. Nobody has even posted to comment on the outdated news. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:42, 3 July 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.