Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Sherlock Holmes

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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) 05:57, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Sherlock Holmes


Abandoned, pointless mini-portal on a narrow topic. Low readership, and redundant to the head article Sherlock Holmes.

The portal was created in March 2014‎ by. The lead of WP:POG says "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained. Matty's last edit to the portal was in April 2014, and Matty retired from Wikipedia in May 2015.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Sherlock_Holmes shows a modets set of subpages. All those which I have checked were created by Matty in March 2014, and all are unchanged since then apart from an August 2015‎ spelling fix to Portal:Sherlock Holmes/Selected character/2.

This abandonment as a small set of ageing content forks is presumably why in October 2018 the portal-spammer @The Transhumanist (TTH) "restarted" as an automated page. After a few tweaks, that left the autoamted portal in February 2019 simply as a fancy wrapper around two navboxes: Template:Sherlock Holmes and Template:Sherlock Holmes by others.

This made the portal simply a redundant fork, similar to the 2,550 automated spam portals deleted in April at two mass deletion MFD one, and two.

So in May 2019 I reverted the automation, restoring the last curated version. That was 3 months ago, and unsurprisingly, nobody has touched the portal since.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". I don't believe that a single fictional character ever amounts to a sufficiently "broad topic" to satisfy POG, but even if you form a different view on that subjective judgement, the hard data shows that for the last 5 years there have zero maintainers.

There has also been almost no readers. Since July 2015, the portal has averaged on 12 pageviews per days, while the head article has averaged 6,223 daily views. In other words, readers prefer the head article by a ratio of over 500:1.

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 article. And in this case, the unmaintained portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article with its navbox.

This unused portal is a solution in search of a problem. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:48, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Portal:Sherlock Holmes.  I concur with the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl.  This portal is even more unused than most.  In the Jan-Jun 19 period (not that shown by BHG), it had 11 daily pageviews, as opposed to 5206 for the article.  The portal appears to have only five articles, and they were all last updated in 2014, and the originator has been inactive since 2015 with no replacement. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:33, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this poorly thoughtout portal.Catfurball (talk) 21:36, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the thoughtful and thorough investigation by the nominator. It has essentially been unmaintained since it's inception over five years ago and is barely used by readers, and abandoned fan creations like this bring down the quality of Wikipedia. It's abandoned junk that lures readers to a forsaken time suck with the promise of an enhanced learning experience about this topic, but does nothing of the sort. Sherlock Holmes and the corresponding navbox are far superior to this portal in guiding readers to and informing them about this subject. Newshunter12 (talk) 03:08, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete similarly to the portal about the Wizard of Oz series, this portal appears to be about too narrow of a subject area. Only a few fiction series offer enough material and interest for a full-fledged portal. And I do not see any way to make it about a broader subject area. --Hecato (talk) 22:24, 11 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.