Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fiction

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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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:21, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Fiction

 * Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:02, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:02, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

A navbox-cloned automated portal, redundant to its components.

Created in September 2018‎ by @The Transhumanist (TTH), aka the portalspammer, who at the end of 2018 boasted We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it.

This is one of the last few dozen remaining fully-automated portals, out of over 4,000 created by TTH. It draws its "selected articles" list solely from 4 navboxes:


 * Template:Fantasy fiction
 * Template:Science fiction
 * Template:Speculative fiction all
 * Template:Crime fiction

It draws its "selected images" list solely from 4 articles:
 * Fiction
 * Fantasy
 * Science fiction
 * Crime fiction

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 on e.g. head article Fiction and its navboxes. ... or any of the other pages listed above.
 * 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 even a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.   Try it on any of the articles listed above Fiction, Fantasy, Science fiction, Crime fiction

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

This redundancy has been belatedly acknowledged by TTH, who wrote at the start of this month New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). It's a pity that despite the acknowledgements, he still leaves it to others to identify and remove his automated spam.

Fiction is obviously a very broad topic ... So I propose that this portal 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. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:09, 18 May 2019 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete - So what was the portal platoon trying to accomplish with the push past five thousand to ten thousand if portals were becoming obsolete? (Maybe they didn't know about the new features?  Maybe they didn't know about links and categories?  The last can't be, because they sometimes used categories to scrape portals together.)  The portal has 15 daily pageviews.  The head article has 891 page views, but that doesn't count the views of the child articles that were used to automate this golem.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:10, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:02, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

 SITH   (talk)   11:55, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Automated portal,  1 subpages, created 2018-09-15 05:51:39 by User:TTH, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality: Portal:Fiction. Pldx1 (talk) 09:25, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: meets the usual criteria: auto-created, auto-abandoned, poorly-constructed and totally useless. Also, per overwhelming consensus from the two mass nominations.
 * 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.