Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Indian Premier League

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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. Ruslik_ Zero 18:33, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Indian Premier League


Abandoned portal, almost entirely unchanged since its creation in 2012. Fake DYKs, massively outdated content forks, and all redundant to the head article Indian Premier League, which is vastly better both as a navigational hub and as a showcase for content.

The portal was created in June 2012‎, whose last edit anywhere on en.wp was in 2015. Since 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance" ... but that didn't happen here: Vibhijain's last edit to the portal was in October 2012. The extent of subsequent abandonment is so severe that @MJL tagged the portal in April 2019 as "under construction". MJL rightly self-reverted, because nobody is actually doing any construction; but MJL had correctly identified that the builders are needed.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Indian_Premier_League shows what initially appears to be a not-too-bad set of sub-pages, with a total of 19 articles. That almost meets the WP:POG minimum of 20. However, scrutiny reveals the extent of abandonment of this farm of unsourced content forks: List/5 was wisely converted in 2018 by @Auric to use Transclude lead excerpt, so it is no longer a content fork. However, the page being showcased is List of Indian Premier League five-wicket hauls, which is listed in the navbox Template:Indian Premier League (which has a built-in-preview, see below), so this is simply redundancy which adds no value to the portal.
 * Portal:Indian Premier League/Selected list/1, list/2, list/3, and list/4 all begin with the words "As of 2012". That's seven seasons ago.
 * Portal:Indian Premier League/Selected biography/1, biog/2, biog/3, biog/4, biog/5, biog/6 and biog/7 were all created in June 2012‎ by Vibhijain.
 * Five of them (/2, /3, /4, /5 and /7) remain totally unchanged since 2012.
 * One of them (biog1) had a small update in 2015, but it's now a way-outdated intro to its subject Kevin Pietersen
 * One of them (biog/6) was converted in 2018 by @Auric to use Transclude lead excerpt, so it is no longer a content fork.
 * Of the 7 selected articles:
 * Five are completely unchanged since their creation in 2012‎ by Vibhijain: article/2, article/3, article/4, article/5 and article/7
 * article/6 had two minor edits, the last in 2015
 * article/1 has had only minor tweaks since a major edit in 2015
 * Portal:Indian Premier League/Did you know is a fake. 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 I have checked the talk page of all the articles bolded in this set, and not one of them mentions these factoids having ever been part of WP:DYK.  As with far too many other portals, this is just a pure trivia section which misappropriates the branding of WP:DYK.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of ongoing work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors who diligently check and re-check every submission. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. In this case, there has not even been cursory updating, and the result is that the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Indian Premier League.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". However, this portal umainatined since its creation 7 years ago. Readers have stayed away too: in January–June 2019, the portal averaged only 11 pageviews per day, which is only half the abysmal median of 17 daily views for all portals in that period. By contrast the head article Indian Premier League averaged 9,056 daily views in the same period. In other words, the head article got a massive 827 times more views than the abandoned portal.

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 links to Template:Indian Premier League, 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 Indian Premier League, 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 portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value it might have had in 2012, it has now been abandoned for longer than the IPL existed when the portal was created. This is a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:17, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:37, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete for every reason mentioned by BrownHairedGirl except use of term "DYK." I wouldn't get too particular about the appropriation of this term. Main page has to be selective or it would get inundated with crap suggestions. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:41, 23 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.