Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:The Muppets

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) 07:23, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:The Muppets (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Abandoned, low-readership mini-portal on a narrow topic. After 14 years it has only 5 selected articles and a set of fake DYKs. It is redundant to the B-class head article The Muppets and comprehensive navbox Template:The Muppets.

The Muppets is a long-running TV show and media franchise, but as a portal it is a triple fail of the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers":

1. It's inherently not a broad topic: Category:The Muppets+subcats contains only 296 articles; the whole of Category:Sesame Street+subcats adds only a further 331 articles. Numerous other portals for a single TV show have been deleted, including Friends, and M*A*S*H.
2. It has not been maintained (details below)
3. It has very few readers: in January–June 2019, the portal had average of only 10 pageviews per day, which is about half of the abysmal median for all portals.

This is an old portal. It was created[1] in September 2005‎ Zanimum (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), whose last edit to the portal was on the day of its creation.[2] Most of the subpages were created by other editors, but that was all a long time ago.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:The Muppets shows a small set of sub-pages:

1. Portal:The Muppets/Selected article/1, /2, /3, /4 and /5, all created in 2011 and all unchanged since 2011 apart from disambiguations and page moves.
2. Portal:The Muppets/Did you know contains 4 items, 3 of which date from 2007.[3] Apart from being 12 years old, I haven't found any trace of any of the 4 items have ever been through the WP:DYK process of scrutiny prior to listing on the Wikipedia main page. So these are fake DYks, which abuse the good name of WP:DYK as a branding for unchecked WP:TRIVIA.
3. Portal:The Muppets/Selected character, which since its creation 2007 has been Sam Eagle.[4]

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 any of this links to {{The Muppets}}, 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 The Muppets, 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 portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value it might have had in 2005, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:49, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per the thorough investigation of the portal by the nominator. With over seven years of no maintainers and almost no readers, this abandoned junk portal clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This one simply doesn't. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I concur with BHG that a single TV show like this is inherently not a broad enough topic for a portal, which is why I am strongly against allowing recreation. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:01, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Portal is not adding any value to the project. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 07:57, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as per analysis by nominator. Little viewing and no maintenance. I concur with the arguments of the supporting !voters. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:41, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Note that there is a redirect from Portal:Muppets. Those backlinks will need attention if the portal is deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:07, 18 August 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.