Someone asked me to comment on the meta cleanup project, and foundation-l is subscription-only, so I guess I'll comment here.
Basically, I agree with a lot of what Anthere said on the foundation-list. I think a lot of people that come to meta freak out a lot when they see the funky essays and don't realize that meta is sort of a seperate project. What Walter said on Meta:Babel is pretty accurate too - it is the bus station for several wiki projects. In terms of the cleanup project in general though I thought/think it is a great idea - cleanup on meta is always welcome - however, there were just a lot of bad tags, perhaps due to recent changes in deletion policy (or rather, more recent ambiguity), and I myself was a little abrupt at times. The whole ironic part is that even though several were claiming there wasn't a "meta community" I think a few prospectives for administrator are finding out that there indeed is a bit of one...
I also stated in agreement with David that at times it is a bit the "personal wiki" of the stewards on Meta:Babel. Really though, it is sort of a semi-serious thing, I mean there isn't exactly a whole lot of policy debates there relating to meta because it itself is fairly clearly defined as to what it is - i.e. a sort of MeatBall-esque wiki - and there isn't a TON of activity. Personally, I find it as a "feature" that you can still track things with recent changes :). Besides, the stewards there are by far doing a good portion of that work so the fact that it is "run" by them is probably a result of activity more then anything else.
Anyway, I hope people don't give up on cleaning up meta. You can still have nearly all the interproject pages you need - and just having the essays there isn't going to hurt that too much.
P.S. "Don't be a dick" is up for being moved AGAIN. Really, this thing should just be on english because while it is tolerable there in non-english languages it can be unnecessarily unruly. "Don't be a jerk" is probably a decent replacement, albiet less traditional.
Your en and meta administrator [[w:User:RN]] [[m:User:RN]]