Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fire

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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) 08:16, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Fire


Static portal abandoned since 2008. No list of topics or rotation of topics, just one static topic. Redundant to the head article Fire and its navbox Template:Fire.

Created in December 2005‎ by, whose last edit was in 2011. This was before the late-2006 addition to the lead Wp:POG "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance", and no maintenance has happened here.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Fire shows few sub-pages:
 * Portal:Fire/Featured article. Same topic (Hamlet chicken processing plant fire) since 2008
 * Portal:Fire/Selected picture. Same 3 pictures since February 2012
 * Portal:Fire/Did you know Five items, the last added in 2015. . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.

WP:POG 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 130 consecutive updates.

In theory, this a broad topic. 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 23 pageviews per day, which is nearly double than the abysmal median of 14 per day for all portals, but still well under 0.5% of the 1,951 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 Fire and its navbox Template:Fire.

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).
 * 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 Template:Fire, open in private/incognito window, and then mouseover any link to see the preview.
 * 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 Fire, open in private/incognito window, and then click on any image to start the slideshow.

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 Fire and its navbox Template:Fire

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. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:29, 2 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom.--Srleffler (talk) 20:58, 2 June 2019
 * Delete - Concur with the analysis by BHG. Portal has 23 daily pageviews, which is better than many portals, but not comparable to the 1951 pageviews of the article.  Robert McClenon (talk) 02:38, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Since Fire was considered in pre-modern times to be one of the four classical elements, I was thinking of comparing this portal to Portal:Water, Portal:Air, and Portal:Earth, but, while the first portal does exist, the three topics are really all covered (as topics of modern science) by Portal:Earth sciences, and it appears to be well-maintained by User:RockMagnetist. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:38, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
 * 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.