Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wicca (2nd 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) 04:19, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Wicca


Almost-abandoned mini-portal, with almost no readers. Mostly just a collection of decade-old unsourced content forks and fake DYKs. Redundant to the head article Wicca, which readers prefer by a ratio of over 200:1.

The abandonment is presumably why the portal was converted in January 2019‎ by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to a wholly-automated format which cloned the navbox Template:Wicca. This made it just a bloated redundant fork of the said navbox, so in May 2019 I reverted it to the last non-automated version. (For an explanation of why that type of automated portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Wicca lists a modest set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Wicca/Selected biography/1, /2, /3, /4 and /5 were all created in 2011. The only subsequent edit to any of them was in 2018, when an image was added to /2.But all five are 8-year-old, unreferenced content forks.
 * Portal:Wicca/Did you know. No new additions since November 2006. 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 even if it was derived from DYK, this thirteeen-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect would as a trivia section. However, I have checked the talk pages  of these items have, and so far as I can see none of them have appeared on WP:DYK.  So this has been pure trivia from the outset.
 * Portal:Wicca/Selected article/1 to Portal:Wicca/Selected article/11 were all created in 2011. Five of them (/1, /10, /11, /3, /7) were all converted in 2018 to use Transclude lead excerpt, so they are no longer content forks; but the remaining six are 8-year-old, unreferenced content forks.
 * Portal:Wicca/Quotes has contained	 the same lone unsourced quote since its creation in 2009

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 in practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers, and it has also been shunned by readers: in January–June 2019, the portal got only 14 page views per day, while the head article Wicca got 2,767 daily views. In others words, the head article got 203.6 times as many views as the portal.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Wicca and its comprehensive navbox Template:Contemporary witchcraft.

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:Contemporary witchcraft, 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 Wicca, 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. Time to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:53, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: The previous MfD is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wicca, where the closing admin wrote "I expect the parties to keep maintaining the portal lest it end up here at MfD again." Prophetic! UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:58, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, UnitedStatesian.
 * That was in 2011. What happened was that there was a flurry of activity before the MFD closed, to get the "keep" result.  And then nothing since.
 * I have seen this pattern repeated with many portals. Some enthusiastic editors think that they can "rescue" a portal by a set of updates while it is under scrutiny at MFD, but they don't follow through with ongoing maintenance.  I wouldn't be surprised to see the something similar happening again, in the hope of a  similarly distorted MFD outcome ... so I trust that the closing admin will distinguish between a one-off driveby update and the continual maintenance which any portal needs. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 13:09, 9 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as per analysis by BrownHairedGirl. As the previous history shows, empty promises to maintain a portal that is rescued from deletion are empty promises.  The portal lists three related portals, which are also shown in this table:

As can be seen, the related portals are not being well maintained either, but have more readers than this portal does. This portal is not about to start attracting readers or maintainers. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:43, 10 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete who cares about Whichcraft not me! This portals viewership is almost flat as a pancake.Catfurball (talk) 20:58, 15 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.