Proposals for closing projects/Deletion of Afar Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wiktionary

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This is a proposal for closing and/or deleting a wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is subject to the current closing projects policy.


The proposal is rejected and the project will not be deleted.

  • A Language Committee member provided the following comment:
    I suggested to reject this and similar requests because the only reason given for deleting is that these projects are unlikely to be reopened. Not much value in doing that was shown, and per phabricator:T168764#3378717 and the page linked from there it seems that such a deletion would only cause unnecessary technical problems, especially if by chance one of them should be reopened. --MF-W 23:14, 1 July 2017 (UTC) - Rejected. See also phabricator:T169928. --MF-W 22:19, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • Type: 2 (non-routine proposal)
  • Proposed outcome: project deletion
  • Proposed action regarding the content: not applicable since what was there was already moved to the Incubator years ago, there's nothing to transfer.
  • Notice on the project: IMHO not needed as projects were already closed 8 years ago.
  • Informed Group(s): none.

Requesting deletion of this projects:

After eight to nine years ago they were closed, there's absolutely no need to have dead wikis sitting there wasting database resources for nothing but to show a main page with a sitenotice. If notification is still required I'll do it. —MarcoAurelio 12:22, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Isn't aawiki used for some testing purposes by developers? I think I once read something to that effect, but don't remember any details. --MF-W 17:54, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    @MF-Warburg: We use aa.wikibooks for testing (voluntary) CentralNotice banners, as a way to preview how are they seen, etc. (cfr. Special:CentralNotice). I am not aware of any other uses appart of that one. If that's the only use, I guess we can use another locked site instead of those ones or have a dedicated site instead. —MarcoAurelio 18:09, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    We now have Beta Clusters, so let's feel free to delete these closed wikis from our database. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 08:28, 10 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly Oppose deletion of aawiki. That is definitely used by deployers from time to time. Indifferent on the other two. ^demon (talk) 03:26, 11 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Content wikis are not our playground for testing, ^demon. We have several other closed projects you could test on, or use the bet clusters as Luxinyu mentioned above. —MarcoAurelio 20:31, 11 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    It's not a playground for testing. It's a closed wiki that's used when you need to run maintenance scripts. The most common example is addWiki.php, which requires a --wiki parameter but doesn't actually end up impacting that wiki. But there's other crons in puppet that do the same thing. I mean technically we could change that to any s3 wiki, but docs already mention it and it's muscle memory for quite a few of us--plus it's always been at the top of the all.dblist so that's pretty much why it was chosen. Beta does not suffice for this for obvious reasons. "Wasting database resources" isn't a good reason to outright delete a wiki because it's not actually wasting anything. I mean, I guess any closed wiki would suffice for this usecase, but what's to prevent us from rehashing this discussion later when another closed wiki wants deletion because it's wasteful? ^demon (talk) 01:43, 12 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Okay, that detailed explanation makes sense. I'm willing to drop aawiki from the list, but the other two can safely go IMHO. —MarcoAurelio 13:23, 12 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Yep, I agree the other two are unused, no opposition here :) ^demon (talk) 15:57, 12 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]