Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:The Chronicles of Narnia
- 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. Per the narrowness of the topic/lack of a sufficient number of articles that would fall within its purview. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:03, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
This portal has an inactive maintainer. Portal:The Chronicles of Narnia has also been known as Portal:Narnia. This is another fictional universe portal. The combined viewings of the two titles of the portal in the first half of 2019 were 19 average daily pageviews. By contrast, the two head articles had a combined 3693 pageviews in the same period.
- The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore 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. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense 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 selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (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 maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
- The portal has a single-page format, with 10 selected articles and 4 selected adaptions (sic), which are selected from two embedded lists. (Well, we know what adaptions are.)
- This portal has a designated maintainer, User:Greatedits1, but Greatedits1 has not edited the portal since Oct. 2018, or Wikipedia since May 2019. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
- Delete per the nom. Redundant to head article Chronicles of Narnia and with very low viewership compared to the head article in the same period. The B-Class head article also has multiple rich and versatile navboxes, which are all readers need for exploring this topic. As with Portal:Harry Potter and Portal:Pokémon (both deleted at MfD), this is a portal about a popular franchise or book/movie series, but the portal is long abandoned junk created by fans as fan-service and who left it to rot many years ago. Just delete it, and I oppose re-creation, since individual franchises or book/movie series should not have a portal as they are too narrow a topic and serve as fan-service or adverts. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:15, 13 November 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 a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.
- On this case I think that the appropriate new links would be to Portal:Speculative fiction. Alternative suggestions welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:42, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
- Delete per nominator. Far too narrow a topic, redundant to head article Chronicles of Narnia and its navbox Template:Narnia.
- Navboxes provide much better navigation, because they have the key advantage that the reader can move directly from page to page, rather than having to load a separate portal page. On broad topics, navboxes cannot possibly cover all they articles, so there is a better case for a portal, but on a very narrow and tightly-bound topic such as this, the navbox can be comprehensive. I just used WP:AWB to analyse Category:The Chronicles of Narnia+subcats: there are only 103 actual articles, plus 183 redirects. So it would be quite feasible to expand Template:Narnia to link to every article on Narnia. It already links to 94 articles. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:15, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
- Conflicted about this nomination. I've definately taken an extended Wikibreak since I last edited and need to catch up on the discussion around portals. Robert McClenon, thank you for tagging me.
- As far as some of the arguments for deleting the portal go, I must disagree with them. In particular, I must disagree with Newshunter12's comment that this portal is "long abandoned junk created by fans as fan-service and who left it to rot many years ago." When I updated the portal, with the exception of the DYK section (which I didn't know what to do with at the time), I made sure to design it in a way that it would not require constant maintenance. As you can see, the portal has not fallen out of date like many manual portals would do after this span of time. Therefore, I would not oppose re-creation if there are enough good articles for a portal in the future.
- However, I understand the thought process for deleting this portal. In particular, it does have access to fewer good articles than I would like for a portal. If the concensus is to delete, it should be on the number of articles that are able to be included in the portal and not just because a portal is about a particular topic. I am still reading over how the arguments over portals have changed in the past few months. I will update this if I feel like I can give a better answer before this MFD closes. Greatedits1 (I hope so | If not, let me know) —Preceding undated comment added 01:40, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Greatedits1: thanks for your thoughtful response. I will just note that the small numbers (only 103 articles in all), whereas successful portals have thousands or tens of thousands) and the narrow nature of the topic are inextricably bound ... and the narrowness of the topic is also a crucial factor in the failure to attract readers and maintainers, without whom any portals fails. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:38, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Delete books don't need portals period.Catfurball (talk) 16:20, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- Delete per nom; far too narrow a topic area for portal and over-taken by Main Article+Navbox. Britishfinance (talk) 18:53, 19 November 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.