Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:War of 1812

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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) 04:38, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:War of 1812


Mini-portal with only 11 selected articles, abandoned for a decade. Redundant to the head article War of 1812 and its good navbox Template:War of 1812.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:War of 1812 shows a list of the sub-pages. All off them are unsourced content forks, untouched for at least 9 years.

The two DYK pages have had no new aditions since 2010. . 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 9-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.

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:War of 1812, 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 War of 1812, 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. They make redundant the whole model of one-at-a-time excerpts on which this and most older portals were built. Only the mega-nvabox style portals such as Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are suitable for the new era.

But this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies radically changed the game:
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but this portals has been unmaintained for nine years, and it has abysmal page views. In Jan–Feb 2019 it got an average of only 13 pageviews per day, only one more than the abysmal median for all portals of 16 views/day and a risible 0.27% of the 4,809 daily views for the head article.
 * WP:POG requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But after ten years, has only 11 articles, just half the bare minimum.

After a decade of neglect, there is no basis for expecting that editors will be forthcming to rebuild the portal on a new model, let alone maintain it. So I say just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:00, 3 July 2019 (UTC) While the Napoleonic Wars portal has ten times as many articles as the War of 1812 portal, neither portal is heavily viewed, and neither portal is well-maintained. The large number of articles is a significant advantage for the Napoleonic Wars portal, which is not being considered for deletion, only for comparison. This portal should simply be deleted. Any effort that might be applied to redesigning it would be better applied to Portal:Napoleonic Wars or Portal:History or to improving the articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:12, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete in favour of Portal:History. when entering the History Portal, you should be able to find the War of 1812 article in there, you should not be expected to back out and look for such a specific door, if your were doing that you would be much better served by going straight to the article.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:19, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl - I have compared this portal with Portal:Napoleonic Wars, since the War of 1812 was one of the Napoleonic wars, the one fought in North America.
 * For any coverage of historic wars like these, to do it properly, scholarly, you absolutely must speak directly to the sources. By being a presentation stripped of explicit sourcing, these Portals are a really bad idea.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:16, 4 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - A portal about a single war is "per se" narrow and redundant with Portal:War. Military portals browsebar is a collection of portals in this situation.Guilherme Burn (talk) 21:10, 7 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete Abandoned (per edit history) and ignored (per pageviews).  A great job has been done on the whole article space on this topic, but while the "main article" is still being heavily edited (per edit history), this portal is ignored (e.g. even editors interested in the topic ignore it).  I do think that the format of the navbox in the portal is useful (the only thing the portal brings); the navbox on the "main article" has all the links by diverting to list articles, however, being able to see all battles in one navbox shows the scale of coverage – could this be kept as a collapsed additional navbox on the "main article"?
 * 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.