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. ‑Scottywong | [comment] || 04:12, 19 November 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:Middle-earth

Portal:Middle-earth ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Another franchises portal. Narrow topic (for a portal) and totally redundant with the main article. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:47, 12 November 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete per the nom. Redundant to head article Middle-earth and with low viewership at 40 views per day in the first half of 2019, while the head article had 1,030 views per day in the same period. The B-Class head article also has a rich and versatile navbox, 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, but the portal is long abandoned junk created by fans as a fan-service and who left it to rot many years ago. Just delete it, and I oppose re-creation, since individual franchises should not have a portal as they are too narrow a topic and serve as fan-service or adverts. This portal was created May 22, 2005, so it is one of the earliest portals to exist and comes from a time when fan-service creations flourished throughout Wikipedia. Newshunter12 ( talk) 18:51, 12 November 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete as per User:Guilherme Burn - The topic isn't really a franchise, because it preceded the modern concept of entertainment franchises, but a fictional universe (and some franchises are about fictional universes that may be set in an alternate past, in an alternate present, or in the future). The principle is the same as for alternate universe franchises.
  • 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 less than 4% of the viewing of the main article.
  • (By the way, the table below the signature of the nominator was provided by the nominator, not the next commenter.)
  • There are only 7 selected articles, which were content-forked in 2006, and has a result have diverged from the original articles. No new articles have been content-forked, although depictions of the fictional universe are evolving. For instance, The Hobbit film series is not mentioned, which it should be in an up-to-date treatment of the depictions of the fictional universe.
  • The portal has no maintainer. The portal was created in 2005 by an IP address, which is neither a reason to keep it nor a reason to delete it. The lack of a maintainer is an issue.
  • Previous portals about fictional universes have been deleted. Robert McClenon ( talk) 23:25, 12 November 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 a bot ( BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.

In this case I think that the appropriate new links would be to Portal:Speculative fiction. Alternative suggestions welcome. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 07:14, 17 November 2019 (UTC) reply

• Delete. Another abandoned portal on a narrow topic.

This is just a single fictional universe. Thanks to Wikipedia's systemic biases, it is a narrow topic covered in copious detail with 673 unredirected articles. (The number was far higher a decade ago before a lot of fancruft was merged; but it looks like there is room for more consolidation).

However, despite this bias, it lacks enough quality articles to sustain a portal: there are only 3 FA-Class Tolkien articles and 10 GA-Class Tolkien articles.

The nominator has helpfully documented the scale and duration of the abandonment by editors, and no WikiProject has shown any interest for over a decade. I checked WhatLinksHere from WikipediaTalk namespace, and the only topical project ever to show any interest was WP:WikiProject Middle-earth. Most of the links are from a nav template ({{ ME-nav-compact}}) which links to the portal; apart from the current MFD notice, the most recent mention of the portal on the project's talk page was posted in September 2008. This is now just a decayed relic of a phase of portalmania which has long passed.

As @ Newshunter12 notes, readers are much better served by the B-class head article Middle earth and by the topic's rich collection of navboxes (see Category:Middle-earth navigational boxes). Tightly-bound topics such as a single fictional universe or media franchise are very well-suited to comprehensive navbvoxes, which provide much better navigation than a portal because the navbox is (or should be) transcluded on every page in the set. The abandonment of this portal is therefore an example of what @ Britishfinance helpfully calls "rational abandonment": i.e. editors familiar with the topic have made a rational choice not to waste time and energy on the portal, because better navigational tools are available. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:54, 17 November 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.