[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

[Robert Scott Horning]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>David Gerard wrote:
>  
>
>>This isn't a proposal for an English meta at all. It was an 
>>attempt to make Meta actually useful as a cross-project work 
>>wiki, rather than a disorganised collection of historical 
>>documents with a few working pages camped out in the 
>>archaeological rubble.
>>    
>>
>
>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.
>  
>
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