Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:South Park (3rd 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) 00:22, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:South Park

 * – (View MfD)

Portal created in 2012 and barely maintained since. Some subpages are significantly older as they survived despite the deletion of the portal in 2006 and 2007.

The portal offers a selection of "did you know" which seem to come all from a sprint in 2009 and are very focused on the controversies about religion, possibly influenced by the Charlie Hebdo discussions of 2006 and later.

The intro of the portal was converted to automatic transclusion from the lead section of South Park, which however only displays "298" on account of the onlyinclude tags used there. The portal maintainers, if any, should coordinate with the other users to keep the canonical number of episodes somewhere else. However, this coordination effort may be unwarranted if nobody cares about the portal in the first place. Nemo 06:33, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Too narrow a topic to merit a portal, or even a redirect. bd2412  T 13:19, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - The portals about  franchises (Portal:Star Wars, Portal:Family Guy, Portal:Star Trek, Portal:Dragon Ball, Portal:The Simpsons, etc) look like a themed Wikia. In the absence of a guideline how to define if a franchise is a broad topic?Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:03, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks?  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Television), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 16:00, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete with silver bullets. This is a zombie portal.  It has already been killed twice, and has returned from the dead, and probably should have been left for dead, but may have been re-animated by one of the religions that is parodied on South Park.
 * The first problem with this portal is that it does not provide a view of the lede of the head article South Park. It displays 298, which is only a number.  It had 9 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, as opposed to 4042 for the head article.  Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:South_Park shows 20 articles, 4 characters, DYKs, one picture, and other subpages.   The 24 articles were content-forked between 2012 and 2014, and have not had substantive maintenance since then.
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense.  It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers.  This imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense:  (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained.  Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
 * I concur with User:BD2412 that this portal should not be upmerged. It should have been dead twelve years ago.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:05, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this state. Low page views and the condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, so any comparison to how broken articles are handled would be improper. The downgrading of POG cuts both ways - there is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. -Crossroads- (talk) 00:46, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Too narrow topic for a portal.--Darwinek (talk) 01:20, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete too little maintenance, too little content. The fact that it's already died twice also sets itself up for some comparisons to Kenny. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 07:05, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete like other editors have said way to narrow.Catfurball (talk) 19:02, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. A single TV show is far too narrow a topic for a portal.  In this case, the portal is clearly an attempt to solve a non-problem, because all the content on South Park is very well interlinked by the navboxes Template:South Park  and Template:South Park episodes.  These do a vastly better job than the portal, because the navboxes are displayed on each article, with no need to visit a separate page for the links.
 * Little wonder that the portal has been abandoned for a decade, and that selection seems to reflect a particular POV. This is a structural vulnerability of narrow-topic portals: the lack of readership means that even when they are grossly unbalanced, it is unlikely that such problems will be spotted, let alone fixed. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:50, 3 October 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.