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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:The Bahamas

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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. ‑Scottywong| [communicate] || 03:17, 29 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:The Bahamas

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Portal:The Bahamas (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Abandoned mini-portal on a narrow topic, viz. the small island nation of The Bahamas. Created in 2011, it still consists of a slim set of fake DYKs, and only 7 selected pages, which is only a third of the WP:POG minimum of 20. One of the biog pages fails to mention that its subject has been dead for three years; another that it subject retired 6 years ago.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This fails on each of the three counts:
  1. ☒N Broad topic. The Bahamas is a small, developing island nation with a population of only about 330,000.[1] This is small for a geographical portal. The experience of data examined at many dozens of MFDs on geographical portals is that regions or cities with population under a million rarely achieve high levels or readership or maintainers, and that several million is needed to get a decent chance of viability. For example, if The Bahamas was an American city, its population would place it at 58 in the list, between Santa Ana and Riverside. It has barely half the population of the smallest US state, Wyoming, and the portals for 12 of the smallest US states have been deleted because of their narrowness and abandonment.
  2. ☒N High readership. Clear fail. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 6 views per day is trivially low.
  3. ☒N Lots of of maintainers. Clear fail. The content is unchanged since 2011, apart from a few formatting edits, and the addition in 2018 of two biog pages.

WP: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.". However, WikiProject Bahamas is at best dormant. The last non-notification post there was in 2012[2], and it got no replies.

Even more tellingly, the proposed creation of this portal was announced[3] by Dannyboybs18 (talk · contribs) in 2011 on a please-join-in, but I'm-going-ahead-anyway basis, and nobody replied to the post.

So after telling the project I will wait for someone to respond to this for three days, Dannyboybs18 created the portal[4] less than 9 hours after the announcement. Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create", but Dannyboybs18 did not follow that guidance: his last edit to the portal was only 4 months later, in December 2011.[5] Whatever Dannyboybs18's reasons for abandoning the portal, portals need maintainers ... and since Danny moved on, the only non-formatting maintenance was the 2018 creation Of two new biog pages.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:The Bahamas shows a slim set of sub-pages:

So what we're left with is an abandoned portal which fails at least five points of POG: narrow topic, low readership, no maintainers, no supporting WikiProject, and creator who didn't maintain it.

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, and do a much better job that all but the best-developed portals . 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:The Bahamas topics, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it only on any link in the head article The Bahamas.
  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 The Bahamas, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of ~20 images. It's a vastly better image gallery than the 4 images on portal, which are displayed

Like too many portals (but thankfully not all), this one is failed solution to a non-problem. It was created in a hurry and abandoned soon after, and after 8 years it's time to stop luring readers away from the much-better-maintained head article to this stunted relic which misleads readers. Time to just delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:50, 21 August 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 useless time suck that lures readers to abandoned junk that misinforms them. I also oppose re-creation, as nearly eight years of hard evidence shows the Bahamas is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:05, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl - Too little readership, too few articles, too little maintenance. There is no short-term reason to expect that a re-creation of this portal will address the problems. Any proposed re-creation of this portal using a more modern design, and taking into account the failures of many portals, can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:56, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing admin. If you close this 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:Caribbean), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:23, 25 August 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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