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: No consensus. I find persuasive arguments that the subject area is broad enough to sustain a portal, and Gazamp and SportingFlyer have volunteered to maintain the portal. However, I also find persuasive arguments that readers would be served equally well if not better by a navbox, that articles in the topic area as a whole are underdeveloped, and that our resources would be better spent trying to improve the articles rather than maintaining a portal.  At this time I do not see a clear consensus either way. I suggest those arguing for a navbox create one, and those arguing to keep the portal continue to work on improving both articles in the topic area and the portal itself, and perhaps revisit this discussion in 6-12 months.   ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 15:09, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Tashkent[edit]

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

(Time stamp for bot to properly relist.) ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:42, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This portal does nothing but repeat the text from the article lead and allow you to scroll through photos already in the article Tashkent. The only other pages it links to are the 12 districts of the city, also linked from the article. This adds nothing to the reader's experience. Just a distraction on the way to the article. Why would we direct a reader from the article on the city to this page? Legacypac (talk) 15:57, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. Though there's quite a lot of content in the categories for Tashkent, on spot checks little of it seems above stub or a short start. No prejudice to recreating once appropriate content has been developed in English, as capital cities with a long history are suitable portal topics. Espresso Addict (talk) 16:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I'm generally ok with capital city portals but this one is only half built with no effort being put into it. Adds nothing to the article. Legacypac (talk) 17:04, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep This is a copy-and-paste keep vote due to the large number of nominations stating I have reviewed the portal and believe it passes WP:POG. SportingFlyer T·C 18:39, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When copypaste voting at one a minute or more you barely have time to find and open the MfD, paste and save. This vote does nothing to address the nomination reasons. Legacypac (talk) 21:09, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I use multiple tabs. My vote stands. I do not appreciate you trying to eliminate my votes as disruptive. SportingFlyer T·C 21:16, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete This meets neither the breadth-of-topic nor the quality-of-Wikipedia coverage requirements of the WP:POG guideline. !voters are encouraged to focus on guideline-based reasonings. UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as per nominator, and under construction too long, so clearly not needed. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:15, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Gazamp (talk · contribs) fixed up the portal on April 3, adding in a number of articles which clearly show the breadth of the topic and fixed a number of the photos. If there was a problem before, there's much less of a problem now. SportingFlyer T·C 05:56, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment the city is over 2 million people and a national capital which are reasons it qualifies for a portal. Now that the page has been fixed it is not useless compared to most portals. I'm ok with a withdrawal if others will recind their delete votes. Legacypac (talk) 01:54, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I still don't see how Portal:Uzbekistan doesn't completely duplicate this content. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:27, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Dear Gazamp (talk · contribs), if you are volunteering as a maintainer for this portal, please say so in the ((Portal maintenance status)) line. Pldx1 (talk) 11:13, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Done Pldx1, apologies for the late reply as I was away from a computer for the last few days. I've done as suggested and will maintain the portal if it survives. Gazamp (talk) 21:07, 14 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - Maintained portal. Doesn't belongs to this series. Pldx1 (talk) 21:18, 14 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - I am not deleting my delete unless there is a volunteer to maintain. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:13, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No value over the article itself so still delete. Legacypac (talk) 07:43, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon: If Gazamp doesn't, I will. It was on my list to fix up but Gazamp happily beat me to it. SportingFlyer T·C 04:26, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Neutral with the understanding that the portal, if kept, may be renominated within 60 days if it is not maintained. We have seen too many good-faith agreements to maintain portals that have not been kept. The argument of WP:NOTCOMPULSORY is true but irrelevant. Keeping a portal is optional; maintaining a portal is not optional. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:33, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Convert to navbox, then delete. The addition of further articles to the list[1] has improved it beyond the state it was in when nominated as simply a bloated version of Template:Districts of Tashkent. At that point, it was simply another automated pseudo-portal.

However, even with these additions it remains simply an image gallery plus a scroll-through list a randomly-selected subset of the grand total of 22 articles. Readers would be much better served by a navbox, which would simultaneously display links to all these topics in one place. The mouseover previews which are shown to unregistered users provide nearly all the preview functionality of the portal, without being restrained to see only one link at a time. Put simply, navboxes offer vastly superior reader experience.

As is so often the case with these portals, the portal is a solution in search of a problem. Our readers would be vastly better served by a navbox than by yet another portal whose existence implicitly makes the WP:PORTAL promise that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", but whose reality is just a degraded version of the head article.

Tashkent is only a Level-4 vital article, i.e. it is in the 1,001–10,000 range of priority topics. The history of en.wp portals shows that most portals even in the top 1,000 are neglected; that is what prompted the failed crusade to automate them. I see no reason to believe that 4 months after its creation, this portal is likely to sprout into a rare exception to the dismal norm.

Much as I value the goodwill of @Gazamp and SportingFlyer, they have made similar commitments to other portals but I have yet to see any example where either of them has taken a useless portal like this and upgraded it to something which clearly is an "enhanced 'Main Page'" for the topic. There are far too many previous examples of MFDs going back many many years, where similar good faith promises of improvement have been made but not delivered because sooner or later the editors involved find that making a genuinely useful portal requires a lot of sustained hard work, but their time is not unlimited and/or their interests evolve. It's time to put a stop to this time-wasting cycle.

I invite @Pldx1 and @Robert McClenon to review my comments and reconsider their !voters. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:29, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• keeping Keep. This MfD board is not for making policy. And no more portals would be a policy. A better policy, yes, quite sure. But here, we are deciding if this portal, in its present state, is to be deleted, or to be kept (assuming that portal space is kept, at least for now). There are maintainers, and thus stupidities like the Plato, the Versailles and the Bucharest Gate stupidities will be avoided. And this will allow this two users to experiment about their opinion. And perhaps change their mind. Or perhaps not. The road to consensus is rarely straightforward. In any case, using a navbox to keep another track of what they are doing would be great. Or even using this new navbox as the easiest way to program their portal ! Pldx1 (talk) 17:16, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My argument for deletion is based on the existing policy WP:PORTAL, not on my recommendations for the future. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:56, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Question for User:Gazamp or User:SportingFlyer - What value do you propose that a portal will offer to readers that an improved navbox will not? I am not changing my !vote again, which is currently at Neutral, but I think that User:BrownHairedGirl and the community should be told what you plan to provide to the community of readers by maintaining this portal. Also, is there a reason why you are focusing on this particular head article and portal? (Just because IS a reason.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:12, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Robert McClenon: - To be honest, BrownHairedGirl is right - this portal is never going to be a great one merely because of the fact that many of the pages it displays are not great anyway. Although I won't change my vote and I would still offer to maintain the portal, I don't see much worth in it; we would be better off supporting Portal:Uzbekistan. Gazamp (talk) 18:17, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Robert McClenon: It's really frustrating to have the deletion discussion be framed as not whether the largest city in Central Asia can have a portal for passing WP:POG - it clearly checks all of those boxes - but rather does this particular portal "have value," which is a policy discussion. Not only does this pass WP:POG, but both Gazamp and myself have an interest in maintaining this. SportingFlyer T·C 05:33, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • No, @SportingFlyer, this discussion is about the application of existing policy to a page. Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". This junk is not enhanced. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:01, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • User:SportingFlyer is posting nonsense when they say that the argument about whether this portal in its current state has value is a policy discussion. Whether portals have value is a policy discussion. Whether a portal on Tashkent should have value is a matter of portal guidelines, and so is a policy discussion. Whether any particular page in its current form has value is precisely what XFD, deletion discussions, are all about. Pages that have no value should be deleted, at least if there is no reason to believe they can be fixed, and there is no reason to believe that useless portals will be improved, after many broken promises about them. User:SportingFlyer is posting nonsense when they say that the value of this portal as it currently stands is a policy discussion outside the scope of this deletion discussion. It is so what this deletion discussion is about. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:05, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's not nonsense, and I don't appreciate that characterisation of my position. The guidelines on WP:POG aren't well defined, and WP:USELESS is meant to be avoided at deletion discussions. The guideline we're arguing over: "The portal subject area should have enough interest and articles to sustain a portal, including enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section." This article objectively passes, and none of the portal deletionists have shown otherwise. SportingFlyer T·C 21:43, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • @SportingFlyer ... Also in the same guideline: Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create. That is the wording as firmed up[2] by @The Transhumanist. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:22, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Delete - If one of the supporters of the portal will not try to persuade me, one of the detractors of the portal can be persuasive. If no one sees value in the portal, it isn't worth maintaining it as a pixel-sink. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:39, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: with fewer than twenty article links, this portal doesn't meet the breadth of scope for portals. SITH (talk) 12:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. As a capital city it has sufficient scope for a portal to exist. Content issues should be addressed via editing or discussing on the relevant talk pages per WP:DEL-CONTENT, and should bear in mind there is no deadline. WaggersTALK 15:16, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Perhaps you should let User:Gazamp maintain this portal as he sees fit, rather than giving the impression that keep !voters only have spurious arguments for this portal. Pldx1 (talk) 09:10, 9 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete WP:POG says that portal topics must have enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section. The current featured content section has exactly one article of above Start-class: Management Development Institute of Singapore in Tashkent, which is C-class. I've had a look at the larger articles which are in Category:Tashkent and actually have some sort of relevance here and I can't find more which are above Start-class. Even if it is a suitable topic for a portal it's not covered sufficiently well on Wikipedia to sustain one. Hut 8.5 20:59, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Convert to navbox, then delete. Per BHG above. Portal is just a re-cut of the main article, which is missing an overall topic navbox. Don't see the purpose in spreading our already thin editing resources on this, versus having an excellent main article+navbox (which we currently don't). Only then will we have earned the right, in the reader's eyes, to add further detail. At the moment, we neither have a good portal or a good main article+navbox, which it not a good use of our resources and focus. Britishfinance (talk) 11:06, 18 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.