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) 01:02, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Ahmedabad[edit]

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

Another portal which readers simply don't want.

Ahmedabad has a population of about 6 million, That makes it the fifth most populous city in India, and one of the world's fifty most-populous urban areas. So in theory it is possible to argue that it fits the WP:POG criterion of "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Tho please note that a set of topics to a depth which includes all top-50 cities would probably have several thousand members. In the big scheme of human knowledge, a city of 6 million people is just one of many topics of equal significance. Ahmedabad is a Level 4 vital article, which means that it is ranked somewhere between 1,001 and 10,000 in the list of priority topics. Recent discussions suggest that there is unlikely to be a community consensus to permit portals for topics at VA4 and lower.

But in practice it doesn't attract viewers. Just look at the pageview figures, and compare them with the head article

To put it another way, the head article got 165 times the pageviews of the portal in 2018, and 151 times more in 2019.

This is not because of lack of publicity. Portal:Ahmedabad is linked to from precisely 100 articles, and from 13 portals. But despite the links, readers simply do not want it.

The portal was created in 2012, and converted to the automated format in Sept 2018[1]. Today it has been coverted[2] back to the pre-automated version by @Northamerica1000 (NA1K). But NA1K is busy reverting lots of portals to their pre-automated format (see WT:WikiProject Portals#Portal_restoration_to_pre-automated_versions), and here is no reason to expect that they will single-handedly have the energy to maintain all the portals which rotted from neglect in the years before the failed automation experiment.

It is not hard to see why portals such as this are so little used.

1. Wikipedia pages are so heavily interlinked that even a modestly well-written head article on a topic is of itself a portal. This isn't like the mid-1990s web, when web pages were mostly plain text with a few links at the top and the bottom; rich interlinking is now the norm, and portals are redundant.
2. Search. As web analysts such as Jakob Nielsen noted as early as 1998, good search killed navigation, because users found it much easier to search than to navigate a website's menu structures. That's why search suddenly became de rigeur on web sites, and why the major web portals such as Yahoo fell off a cliff. Readers simply don't need portals any more; they are like road atlases in the era of satnav.

It's time to stop luring editors into fettling a type of page whose heyday was over before Wikipedia was even created. Most of these portals are simply redundant forks of the head article, which offer much less navigational utility than the head article. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:33, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (Portal:Ahmedabad)[edit]

• Delete excellent explanation. No one maintains Indian portals anyway. They almost all suffer from serious neglect. Legacypac (talk) 22:34, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - An extremely useful statement as to why portals are not the wave of the future, and which mostly applies to other portals. Thank you, User:BrownHairedGirl. However, User:Legacypac, can we avoid generalizations about Indian portals and address them, like Canadian portals, on their specific merits? This portal was abandoned by its originator before being differently broken by the portal platoon. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:43, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - A great detailed explanation from BHG. Cleaning up the automated portal spam will still leave us with loads of unmaintained portals that aren't being used. Since getting rid of portals altogether doesn't seem to be a possible option, it's clear action will still need to be taken to deal with that mess. As BHG has shown, portals in their current form are simply not a useful tool. Since we have navboxes, portals should only be needed for really really broad topics that are just too big for a navbox to handle. Just a few select broad subject areas, like the ones that appear at the topic of portals right now, customized to organize information specific to that subject with maintainers. Like a subject-specific main page that can be accessed from the main page. Regardless, from what we've seen here and in other discussions, the current state of portals just don't seem to provide a real use to people. Meszzy² (talk) 11:17, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Old portal, 6 subpages, created 2012-05-03 17:17:43 by User:Renamed user xwt3mg45c51n2y2j808. A comment by a maintainer, if any, would be useful. Portal:Ahmedabad. Pldx1 (talk) 14:35, 13 April 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.