Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Niagara Falls

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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) 02:07, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Niagara Falls


Narrow topic, and a fake-curated portal, created in a drive to boost numbers

The Niagara Falls is a very well-known landmark, but it is a narrow topic. Even with Wikipedia's extensive documentation about it, Category:Niagara Falls + Category:Niagara Falls State Park plus Category:Niagara Falls in fiction‎ contains only 38 non-stub articles, and that includes tangential topics such as List of minor planets: 12001–13000. So this 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".

This portal was created in December 2018 by @The Transhumanist (TTH). There is no prior manual version.

It was initially created to draw its "selected general articles" list from, which resolves to Template:Niagara Falls. Since that doesn't exist, that section of the portal just contained "Lua error: No page specified".

So instead TTH used an embedded list of articles, which in principle is a great way to build a portal: it combines all the befits of automation, while still allowing curation, but without the maintenance headaches, vulnerabilities and other failings of the old WP:REDUNDANTFORK model of numerous subpages.

Unfortunately, what TTH actually did was to simply grab the list of articles directly in Category:Niagara Falls (without subcats), and with no curation involved. Yes, I checked, using AWB, and there is an exact match between the list here and Category:Niagara Falls. It even includes the head article Niagara Falls, which is already at the top of the page, but because of this sloppiness is also included in the rotation. It includes none of the topics in the subcats, such as some of the 18 pages in Category:Niagara Falls in fiction.

More importantly, it includes 16 stub articles, which are listed on the face of the portal:


 * Bridal Veil Falls (Niagara Falls)
 * George Barker (photographer)
 * Nathan Boya
 * Brother Island, Niagara River
 * Cedar Island (Niagara River)
 * Harry Colcord
 * Erie Stone
 * Journey Behind the Falls
 * Luna Island
 * Jean Lussier
 * Niagara Falls Suite
 * Queen of the Falls
 * Karel Soucek
 * Charles Stephens (daredevil)
 * Terrapin Point
 * Three Sisters Islands (New York)

It's a long-standing point of WP:Portal/Guidelines that articles selected should not be "not marked as a stub."

But the disdain for quality or curation make sense when we see that the point of making this portal was explicitly to boost numbers in TTH's count of portals. In TTH's "WikiProject Portals update #025, 30 Dec 2018", issued less than an hour after making this pseudo-portal, TTH wrote in the section About that end of the year goal: We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it). We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

Even if the topic was broad enough, this page as it stands is just another piece of portalspam: a hastily-created page without any curation, which differs only in its method (but not its brokenness) from the 2,555 such portals deleted in the two mass deletions of TTH-created spam portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete.

So I recommend delete, with prejudice to re-creation. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:50, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - As per analysis by BHG. One tourist location is not a broad area, and this portal is simply another portal created as part of a portal plauge.  Robert McClenon (talk) 10:16, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Unnecessary and narrow. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:24, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete, the scope of the subject is too small to warrant a portal.  PK  T (alk)  11:08, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Niagara Falls is not a broad enough subject area to need its own dedicated portal — almost anything that could actually be justifiably included in the portal could also justifiably be directly linked in the article, making the portal simply redundant. Boosting the number of portals isn't nearly as important a goal in portalspace as boosting the quality and usefulness of portals, so "racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it)" is not a relevant or worthy reason for this to exist in and of itself. Bearcat (talk) 15:04, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nomination.   SITH   (talk)   13:06, 12 May 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.