David Gerard wrote: Can anyone please explain to me what "work" means here? One of the archaic pages on meta is http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies which hasn't really changed much since September 2004. The project proposal is dead, nobody works on it. There are few better examples of dead meat on meta. The current proposal to "overhaul" meta seems to suggest that the Wikispecies page could be simply deleted. Is that correct? Then next month, someone can come to this new, fresh and legacy-free meta to do "work", for example by suggesting a new project called Wikispecies. Since there is no previous mentioning of this idea, it must be new. Brave new world! If I'm missing something here, perhaps a better explanation of the overhaul plans could be needed. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Lars Aronsson wrote: Absolutely do not delete pages like this! This is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be preserved on Meta and marked perhaps as a historical page, but not removed. Or else you might as well simply delete everything on Meta and restart it as a fresh project like is being done with the French Wikiquote. Seriously, this is going way too far. I've said it before and I'll say it again: What Meta needs is some way to navigate the content, not a need to clean out deadwood like you are suggesting here. Oh, I am sure that there is random nonsense that was put into Meta by some users that needs to be deleted, and is mostly a personal soapbox and perhaps resembles vandalized pages as new user experiments. Clearly you aren't talking about cruft like that, are you? Just because a page hasn't had any edit activity for some period of time does not by itself justify deletion on any Wikimedia project. You need to take into account what links to that content, and how significant it is to the rest of the project. The quality of the prose does have an impact when I'm trying to evaluate pages like this myself... i.e. if it is a significant essay that has been obviously proofread and worked on by more than a couple editors, you should be especially wary of a quick decision to delete the content. In the case of Wikispecies, we need to keep that around as a historical reminder to find out just what went wrong with that proposal, and why did the project turn out so poorly. Negative examples are just as important as positive examples of project pages like the Wikinews or Wikibooks pages on Meta. So are you proposing to delete the Wikinews page as well, since the project is already up and running and no longer needs the page on Meta? The logic is identical here other than a few more recent edits have happened on the Wikinews page instead. I'm certain there is real cruft on Meta of the new user experiment variety that you shouldn't have to waste your time trying to decide if a historical page like the Wikispecies page is worthy of removal. Please deal with the obvious garbage pages first before removing stuff you know is going to get people upset. -- Robert Scott Horning

Ray Saintonge wrote: Compared to similar projects that have been around for the same length of time, its Alexa ranking, and the fact that it is linked prominently on the front page of every Wikimedia sister project, yeah, it isn't doing as well as it could or should be doing. I don't want to open the can of worms about the project status of Wikispecies, but there are some problems on that project that simply need to work everything out. It has also been commonly cited as an example of a project that hasn't worked out or wouldn't be approved if it had to go through the current new project policy. -- Robert Scott Horning