Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Charles Dickens

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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) 02:16, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Charles Dickens[edit]

Portal:Charles Dickens (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Biographies are a broad topic that could satisfy WP:POG? I believe that all information existing in a bibliographic portal will be the same as the base article. The ideal would be to privilege broad topics, Portal:Donald Trump -> Portal:United States Presidents, Portal:Jesus -> Portal:Christianity, Portal:Karl Marx -> Portal:Marxism, Portal:Muhammad -> Portal:Islam etc. In this case, the portal is a decade away without receiving new content. Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:00, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep pending a better nomination, at least. While most biographical subjects do not justify portals, I disagree that none do and there are some sufficiently influential people who could justify it. Jesus and Muhammad have a good claim to being the most written about people in history and would certainly constitute broad topics for portals. Dickens isn't at that level but he is one of the most influential writers in English literature and Category:Charles Dickens contains 412 articles. If you want the portal to be deleted you'll need to come up with more than a personal prejudice against biographical (not bibliographical) portals. Hut 8.5 08:29, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete due to inadequate traffic to the portal to justify a portal, although there isn't a parent portal. See Literary Portals which mentions the lack of a Portal:British literature or Portal:English literature. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:35, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Dickens is a level 3 vital article (i.e., one of the top 1,000), and I am not sure how a portal on such a long deceased person could possibly receive new content as the nominator seems to believe is required. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:51, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nominator. This is a narrow topic, and an abandoned portal.
It is all entirely redundant to Charles Dickens bibliography and Template:Charles Dickens.
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 Charles Dickens bibliography, 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 Charles Dickens, 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 portal 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 this portals has been neglected for 12 years, and it has abysmal page views. In Jan–Feb 2019 it got an average of only 17 pageviews per day, which is a risible 0.29% of the 5,873 daily views for the head article.
  • WP:POG#Article_selection requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But after twelve years, this has only 8 articles, a mere 40% of the bare minimum. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:09, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Can you help fix the problem? --Moxy 🍁 22:03, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I can help fix the problem by removing the time-wasting distraction of a portal which adds no value because it is redundant. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • You are quoting selectively: the sentence goes on to say "that could be showcased on the portal" (my emphasis). It does not say that any number of articles must be showcased. UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:16, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • That seems a bit like sophistry to me, @UnitedStatesian, focusing on the wording and missing the point of the provision. The purpose of the portal is to showcase the topics, so if nobody actually adds the articles to the selection, what's the point of ths portal?
In any case, we have a comprehensive navbox and an excellent bibliography. What does the portal add this? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)
Right now, very little, but deletion is not the way to change that. And more than nothing: 1) the Portal:Charles Dickens/Works subpage shows how a portal's alternative presentation of mainspace content has some promise for better engaging readers; 2) the links to wikiprojects encourage collaboration; 3) etc. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:17, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Answering the question of Robert and the keep voters, it is not a matter of prejudice against bibliographic portals, but of questioning, what does that portals add to the project? Nothing.
There is no objective parameter in WP:POV (the association of vital articles and broad topics, was leading to the creation of ten thousand portals) which turns every abandoned portal MfD into an exchange of opinions about what each editor believes to be the portals goals. I am not fluent in English, if I were, I create one RfC so that WP:POG contains more objective criteria.Guilherme Burn (talk) 02:09, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - This portal has been unmaintained since it was created in 2007. The portal has 9 selected articles, 9 selected pictures, and 9 selected quotes, all selected in 2007. In other words, nothing is changing. While Dickens hasn't written any novels in the twenty-first century, he wrote more than 9 novels in the nineteenth century, so that there are obvious possibilities for maintenance. Weak Delete changed to Delete. A reader can do better to read the head article and the articles on his works, and to use links and categories. Robert McClenon (talk) 07:32, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I have added myself as a maintainer and if the portal survives this MfD I will as an immediate first step add sufficient article subpages to get at least to a total of 20. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:26, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: usual issues of redundant forking and questionable scope for a portal apply. SITH (talk) 16:24, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete The portal isn't the mess that many portals are/were although it does have oddities such as a "Content" tab that just shows a subset of what's on the main portal page.  This portal (like most portals) doesn't get a lot of views and doesn't provide much benefit to readers compared with the article (unless you think showing readers a random image etc is useful).  This portal hasn't been effectively maintained - e.g. a subpage was clearly vandalised and not corrected for nearly 10 years (and corrected by an editor who was looking at the portal because it was at MFD).  It is better not to lure readers away from articles (that are generally maintained) to a portal that isn't. DexDor (talk) 19:06, 12 June 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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