Linguifex talk:Deletion policy

Just curious as to why

"G:8. Inactivity of a personal constructed language. Revertion of deletions shall be petetioned to the administrators."

Is there any reasoning for this? It doesn't consume that much bandwidth, does it? On wikipedia, for example, [1] is only edited about once a month, but it's still a very nice and well written article. The constitution hasn't been edited for awhile, but the US government still keeps that. Heck, we still keep the Rosetta stone, even though that only once-useful hunk of rock has been around for thousands of years. Wikipedia (Correct me if I'm wrong) has no policy detailing deletion of articles due to inactivity.

And what constitutes "Inactivity" anyways? A week? A month? A Year? What if I couldn't access the site for that long, for whatever reason? Can this at least be elaborated upon, if not removed?

Additionally, it's spelled 'Reversion', and 'Petitioned'.

--Mocha2007 (talk) 21:15, 26 March 2013 (CET)

Formalities first; yes, both of them are incorrectly spelt. An old import that must have slipped through. Correeeecting.

However, if you read the corresponding section, G-General, you will see that the 8th paragraph states that deletion is highly arbitrary. Of course, it is not something we do lightly, and I do not even think we have done so since the opening of the wiki...!

A reason for it is what you state yourself; bandwidth. The second, most important reason is simply that the wiki easily gets cluttered by attempts devoid of commitement, abandoned projects and rejected sketches. The administrators are all veterans from a previous wiki, which article-wise grew rather extensive. There, 85% of the languages did not have enough content for them to be remotely interesting, and in retrospect, it could have been avoided. And should we ever delete a page, it just takes us a few seconds and we have it restored! ;)

It is indeed correct that Wikipedia does not delete articles for inactivity, but then they are an encyclopaedia, and we are a community. Don't worry, we don't delete pages for pleasure. (it looks good in the stats if we've got more pages...) But it is nice that you ask! Anything else? Waahlis 23:01, 26 March 2013 (CET)