Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Folklore

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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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 04:52, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Folklore


Static micro-portal abandoned since 2008. Redundant to the head article Folklore with its navbox Template:Folklore genres.

Created in May 2006‎. This was three months before the lead of WP:POG first warned that "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance." ... and this one has not been maintained. Ihcoyc's last portalspace edit was in March 2008. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so an editor is entitled to move on to other interests, but the community has to decide what to do with the abandoned portal.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Folklore shows a tiny set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Folklore/Selected article, which has displayed the same topic since March 2008
 * Portal:Folklore/Selected picture, which has displayed the same picture since March 2008 (see history)
 * Portal:Folklore/Did you know, which has been unedited since the edit which created it in May 2006. It displays one item (Three Little Kittens) which never appeared at WP:DYK.  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 even if it was a product of WP:DYK, this thirteen-year-old item loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section.
 * Portal:Folklore/Quotes: same lone quote as when the portal was created in May 2006

WP:POG says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this portal has missed over 130 consecutive updates.

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 in practice, this portal has had zero maintenance for over a decade, and it has also been shunned by readers: in January–June 2019, the portal got only 13 page views per day, while the head article folklore got 1,127 daily views.

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 folklore and its sidebar navbox Template:Folklore genres, and its several embedded lists.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox offer 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:Folklore genres, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it on some of the lists embedded in Folklore.
 * 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 Folklore, 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. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:19, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. My attempts to call forth interest in the subject a decade ago never really went anywhere.  I remain of the opinion that our coverage of folklore subjects remains rather uneven, with many articles yet to be made and many articles in need of major improvement.  It seems this page is not the place for organizing those efforts, though.  Not sure what having it hurts, but I certainly wouldn't mind terribly if it were deleted. Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 16:09, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, @Smerdis. I think a lot of portals were created back in the late 2000s in the same hope that they would boost editing, possibly through a WikiProject.  With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this very rarely happened ... but it wasn't daft to try it. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:13, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis, and as per discussion between BHG and portal originator. Creating a portal in order to promote editing of a topic appears to be a good-faith failed experiment that has been seen other times in the review of portals.  This portal has even fewer articles than most portals that are being deleted, but that may reflect that it was originally an experiment intended to draw more articles.  Robert McClenon (talk) 22:59, 10 July 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.