The result of the discussion was: Delete. — xaosflux Talk 23:22, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
Abandoned mini-portal on Beijing, the capital of China. A selection of pictures, but no list of articles and no rotation of content.
Created[1] in October 2012 WhisperToMe (talk · contribs).
Converted[2] in September 2018 by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to an automated clone of the navbox Template:Beijing. That made it just a bloated redundant fork of the navbox. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).
In April 2019, it was reverted[3] to a non-automated format.
The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Beijing looks healthy at first glance, but most of the content pages are empty:
WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed over 80 consecutive updates.
In theory, Beijing is a broad topic. Big capital city of huge country, very long history, good coverage. But in practice, it has not met the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 15 pageviews per day, slightly more than the abysmal median of 13 per day for all portals, but still under 0.4% of the 3,754 daily views of the head article. And it has consistently failed to attract maintainers.
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 Beijing and its navbox Template:Beijing.
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox 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).
Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.
That sets a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". It would take a lot of work to make a portal which genuinely offers more than the head article Beijing with its navbox ((Beijing)).
But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and a team of editors to maintain it ... 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) 16:07, 22 May 2019 (UTC)