Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Horse racing

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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 05:54, 18 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Horse racing

Seriously neglected (almost-abandoned) portal with abysmally low pageviews.

Created in 2010 by Searchme (talk · contribs). Since late 2006, WP:POG has warned "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create", but that didn't happen here. Searchme's last edit to this portal was in Feb 2011, and they made only a further 7 edits before giving up editing in July 2012.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Horse racing shows a reasonably large collection of sub-pages ... but mouseovers with WP:POPUPS shows that nearly all of them were last edited over 400 weeks ago, i.e. in 2010/2011.

I checked the biography section, and found that it is an odd mixture of horse biogs and human biogs. I checked the biogs of two horses listed as living:

Portal:Horse racing/Selected biography/4 is about Rachel Alexandra, described as currently active ... but she actually retired on September 28, 2010.
Portal:Horse racing/Selected biography/16 is about Ouija Board (horse), which doesn't mention that she retired in 2006.

There are 42 "Did you know" pages, but the most recent is Portal:Horse racing/Did you know/42, created in October 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 nine-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section

Portal talk:Horse racing contains precisely zero discusison, ever. It consists of only two items: a bot-updated list of recognised content, and mass-messaged note from TTH about the 2018 "reboot" of portals (i.e. the beginning of the failed automation + spam saga).

WP:WikiProject Horse racing appears to be active, but a search of the talk page archives shows that the most recent mention of the portal is the 2010 announcement of the portal's creation: WT:WikiProject Horse racing/Archive 2#Portal.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This fails on two of the three counts:

? Broad topic. Wikipedia has a lot of coverage of horse-racing, but the experience of the last 6 months of MFDs shows that only very broad topics are assuredly viable. Many sports portals have been deleted, including Portal:Canadian football, Portal:Fencing, Portal:Figure skating, Portal:Fishing, Portal:Gaelic games, Portal:Golf, Portal:Gymnastics, Portal:Handball, Portal:Motorcycle racing, Portal:Snooker, Portal:Swimming, and nearly all the by-country portals for association football.
N High readership. Clear fail. The portal's January–June 2019 daily median of only (9 views per day is trivially low. In the same period, the head article Horse racing averaged 889 views per day, 100 times as many as the portal.
N Lots of maintainers. Clear fail. Since Searchme abandoned the portals in Feb 2011, there have been only a very few drive-by edits to the portal's content, plus the usual formatting tweaks to the main portal page.

This portal is a clear fail. Nobody wants to maintain it, the WikiProject is not interested, and all we're left with is a set of nine-year-old content forks. Time to just delete it. I also oppose re-creation, because the clear evidence of the past decade is that readers don't want to read it, and editors don't want to maintain it, while the WikiProject is more interested in actual content than in a failed navigational tool. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:37, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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:Horses + Portal:Sports), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:39, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator, BrownHairedGirl. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to abandoned junk, which if seen will damage Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as over eight years of hard evidence shows Horse racing is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:19, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. There are enough articles at 47, but, as noted, low readership and no maintenance except drive-by edits. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:48, 11 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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.