Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:French and Francophone literature

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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. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:05, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:French and Francophone literature[edit]

Portal:French and Francophone literature (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Abandoned, static portal. Redundant to head articles French literature and Francophone literature, and their shared sidebar Template:French literature.

Created[1] in June 2007‎ by Atropos (talk · contribs), who last edited in 2009. The lead of WP:POG has said since late 2006 "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance", but that has not happened here.

The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:French and Francophone literature is slim:

WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed over 140 consecutive updates.

In theory, this a broad topic. But in practice, it has not met 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". In Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 17 pageviews per day, which is barely above than the abysmal median of 14 per day for all portals, but still well under 0.5% of the 197 daily views of the head article French literature. And it has consistently failed to attract maintainers.

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 Confucianism and its excellent sidebar navbox Template:Confucianism.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox 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:French_literature, open in private/incognito window, and then mouseover any link to see the preview.
  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 French literature, open in private/incognito window, and then click on any image to start the slideshow.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

That sets a high bar for any would-be-portal-builder to vault if they try to satisfy the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". It would take a lot of work to make a portal which genuinely offers more than the head article French literature with its sidebar {{French literature}}.

But maybe someone will find a way to make such a better portal, and a team of editors to maintain it ... so I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:37, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete - I concur with the analysis. The story told by the pageviews is a little different than sometimes. As BHG notes, the portal has 17 daily pageviews. The portal is a heritage portal with subpages, but is set up so that it has two head articles, French literature and Francophone literature. They have, respectively, 197 and 22 daily pageviews, for a total of 219 daily pageviews. Although there is a very large corpus of the lead topics (the literature itself) and written about the lead topics (the literary analysis, literary criticism, and metaliterature), there isn't very much traffic to the articles. The most likely explanation is that this is the English Wikipedia and not the French Wikipedia. I haven't checked the pageviews on the French Wikipedia because I am not literature in the French language. However, although the topic is a broad subject area, it is not attracting readers, let alone portal maintainers, when it is written about in English. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:25, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nom. I don't know whether portals are any more popular on the French Wikipedia than here, but this portal was apparently intended to be updated monthly. And one such update was made ... for August 2007. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 17:17, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - See also my comments at Literature portals. Anyone who is looking to create a properly maintained portal about a broad subject area that has not had a portal can consider English literature or British literature or American literature. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:16, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 12 subpages, created 2007-06-28 08:07:36 by User:Atropos. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. Moliere+Tintin. Les bouts de bois de Dieu ? Portal:French and Francophone literature. Pldx1 (talk) 13:38, 4 June 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.


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