Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:George Orwell (2nd nomination)

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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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 01:29, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:George Orwell

 * – (View MfD)

Automated portal built mostly off Template:George Orwell from which it pulls the selected articles. However thos one has "article cards" for four selected works, which is something I've not seen before. However these little sentence and a half snips don't add anything useful not found in George Orwell which is a much better way to explore Orwell's life and works. Readers much prefer the article anyway as viewing stats show.

We have repeatedly found that individuals, regardless of what line of work, are too narrow a topic under WP:POG. This is an unbundling of Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:George Orwell Legacypac (talk) 15:41, 25 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - Automated portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-09-28 21:10:07 by User:Weegaweek. [|George_Orwell|Portal:George_Orwell pageviews]. Pldx1 (talk) 16:03, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete if the originator is still maintaining the portal. Maintenance of narrow-topic (e.g., single-person) results in a good slide show, but that isn't really enough for a portal.  Robert McClenon (talk) 04:47, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. Orwell seems possibly to form a broad enough topic to merit a portal, per the enduring popularity of Nineteen Eighty-four and to a lesser extent his other works, including some of the essays, and his influence on the English language. I'm an enormous fan of Orwell's work; if this portal survives this MfD, and someone messages me on my talk page (pings seem unreliable and I'm not watching these MfDs), I'm willing to attempt to construct a decent semi-automated portal (by which I mean one that draws extracts from one or more embedded custom lists) on this topic, with at least the minimum of 20 text-based subpages. I don't promise to maintain it in perpetuity, but if properly set up with care, it should need little future maintenance given that the subject is unlikely to write any more works. Pinging previous commenters and portal creator Espresso Addict (talk) 05:28, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * @Espresso Addict, in what way would any such portal
 * have a scope significantly wider than the navbox Template:George Orwell
 * add any value to the navbox and the head article?
 * Note that minimum of 20 pages within scope is a figure advocated by some portal supporters. It has never had wide community support, and I for one regard it as being at least an order of magnitude too low. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:48, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * In the short term, I point you towards my response to this question under Oscar Wilde:, as I didn't get this until I logged on and now must do other things. I'll try to produce a more-customised response later. (You might like to edit your question to refer to the correct navbox.) Espresso Addict (talk) 23:48, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * @Espresso Addict, see my long response there. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:54, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as a WP:REDUNDANTFORK of the navbox Template:George Orwell.
 * As the nominator notes, only the "article cars" distinguish this page from the countless other WP:REDUNDANTFORKs of single navboxes which have been mass-deleted. (For a full explanation of why this type  of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).
 * This portal is the only non-project page to use Template:Article card, and I don't think it's a good idea at all:
 * the "cards" themselves are malformed, each using a scrollbar on a small box like 1990s-style web page frames, where have long been deprecated as a usability disaster.
 * The cards are also pointless, because for readers who are not logged-in, mouseover on any link shows you the picture and the start of the lede. This is simply technology for its own sake, using lots of fancy coding to deploy a redundant feature.
 * George Orwell was a very significant writer, but this is still a narrow topic which fails 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". When the entire topic can be encompassed in a single navbox, I have to see any portal which adds sufficient value to readers to satisfy the WP:PORTAL guiding principle that  "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects".  --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:45, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete too narrow IMO. John M Wolfson (talk) 19:35, 26 April 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.