Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Harry Potter (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. MER-C 18:57, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Harry Potter


Abandoned, abysmal-quality static micro-portal about a narrow but very popular topic. Redundant to the GA-class head article Harry Potter, and its navbox Template:Harry Potter, and assessed by the portals project as bottom-importance.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head aricle. And in this case, this portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Harry Potter and its navbox.

Wikipedia has a wide readership because we have a hard-won reputation for quality. That reputation is damaged when readers are lured to a page which promises enhancement, but turns out to be abandoned junk, and this is some of the worst junk I have seen in the many hundreds of portals which I have scrutinised in the last five months.

This portal was created on 11 January 2006 by. Werdna made a total of 26 edits to the portal, the last one less than an hour aftwr creating the portal. This was a few months before the lead of WP:POG began to display a warning: Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance, so no reproach to Werdna ... but a portal does need ongoing maintenance, and this one never got it.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Harry Potter shows a small, but not-tiny set of supbpages:
 * 2008 there was a brief spurt of someone trying to set up the then-fashionable monthly-edition model for this portal, but it was short-lived. Since 2009, there has been no rotation of the "selected article", with the topic unchanged since November 2009: Horcrux.
 * Portal:Harry Potter/DYK has had some edit-warring in recent years, so it's hard to tell exactly what happened when. But I checked the first 5 items in the [ current version], and none of them have appeared in 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 this is pure trivia, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * Portal:Harry Potter/Featured Character has been displaying the same character simce 2010, i.e. Hermione Granger.
 * It's to tell what on earth is going in with Portal:Harry Potter/Quotes. The current version isn't showing quotes; instead it seems to at least two separate but lengthy extracts of dialogue. I checked a few other versions at random, but they are little better; Dec 2010, August 2009, October 2008.
 * Portal:Harry Potter/Harry Potter news was last updated in 2017, and the current version displays as "news" a piece of trivia from June 2017

Perhaps "abandoned" is the wrong term for this junk. It has been edited quite frequently, but only as a sort of graffiti wall. There seems to have no systematic maintenance and no vision anywhere for what the portal was trying to do. I looked at Portal talk:Harry Potter, where the last actual discussion seems to have been as far back as 2009, when User:The Duke of Waltham asked whether part of this abandoned portal should be deleted. The only reply was his own plaintive followup three months later.

I don't think it's hard to see what's going on here. Despite the huge popularity of the Harry Potter books and their adaptations in other media, this remains a narrow topic. Category:Harry Potter+all its subcats contain a total of only 463 articles. The excellent navbox Template:Harry Potter has 130 unique links, which is 28% of the total Potter articles ... so a portal has little to add to that.

Back in the old days, the portal could add image slideshows and add the display of an extract from a selected article. But now, 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 Template:Harry Potter, 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 Harry Potter, 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. Whatever potential value it might have had it 2006, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:30, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Delete this portal is junk and should have never been created.Catfurball (talk) 21:32, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. This must have been created before all the in-universe HP articles were deleted or merged as "cruft". As such it's now too narrow a topic for a portal. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 17:38, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator's in depth investigation. -Crossroads- (talk) 16:43, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator: not maintained, not held to a good standard, not widely read and not on a broad subject area. — Bilorv (// W A K E U P //) 14:47, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: the first of the two features BHG mentions is available to users with accounts who opt in via "Preferences > Appearance > Reading preferences > Enable (page previews)". I'm not sure whether I've quite understood what the second feature is, but whether logged in or logged out, when I click on an image there's a left and right button to traverse images. — Bilorv (// W A K E U P //) 14:47, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the well reasoned and thorough investigation by the nominator. It has not been maintained or widely utilized, and abandoned fan creations like this indeed bring down the quality of Wikipedia. Harry Potter and the corresponding navbox are far superior to this portal in guiding readers to and informing them about this subject. Newshunter12 (talk) 20:42, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Portal:Harry Potter as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. Essentially abandoned without maintenance for ten years, which is even longer than the usual abandoned portal.  The portal has 35 daily pageviews, which is better than many portals, but is still less than 0.3% of the 12,420 pageviews of the main article, and only has a smattering of about 15 articles.  The lack of maintenance is a show-stopper.  Stop this non-show.    Robert McClenon (talk) 21:47, 5 August 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.