User:Nakaner/Deleting content
I have been actively looking for pages with outdated content and deleting content or the pages on this wiki since 2018. On this page, I explain why.
Pages tracking mapping progress
I have seen a lot of pages about municipalities, counties and states which were created in large numbers in order to track mapping progress between 2008 and 2010. However almost all of them have not been edited for more than ten years except minor wiki fixes by highly active uses (e.g. renaming templates). This proves that the approach to track mapping progress on the wiki has failed. Often the tables are empty and have never been used. They give the appearance of OSM being more incomplete or more unmaintained than it actually is. If no other content except the infobox about the place remains after deleting the tables, I propose deletion. Information about historic OSM events (mapping parties), past and present co-operations with external organisations, documented decisions how tagging schemas, minutes of pub meetings etc. are preserved.
Almost all affected pages refer to places in Germany. See also the discussion on the German forum.
Unmaintained and broken software
The lists of applications using OSM are full of unmaintained, broken or gone software. If the software had a significant influence on OSM's development, I add Template:Historic_artifact_start. I don't delete pages about editors.
See the list of my contributions for examples (I used the commit message "mark as historic" for those pages).
If the use of OSM is limited to a background map or it was just one of multiple GPS tracking apps, I tend to delete the page. There is no clear border between preservation and removal. The license of source code and the length of the wiki page play an important role. The most boring task is to remove all the links pointing to a page being labelled for deletion.
In the past, User:TTTBot maintained software lists on this wiki automatically by reading Template:Software. The bot was abandonded in 2014. Since then, almost nobody bothered to keep lists of apps up to date. Nowadays (2025), osm-apps.org has taken over that role but as an independent website. Therefore, we don't need any lists about apps on this wiki nobody can keep up to date in a dozen languages.
Unmaintained documentation about software
This content does not help anyone any more. It distracts people seeking support and annoys maintainers with questions/complaints by users about wrong documentation.
If a piece of software has its own and maintained documentation elsewhere (GitHub, project website, …), I usually propose deletion of the content on the wiki. I propose deletion as well if the documentation refers to multiple years old versions. Examples: I clean up unmaintained documentation about tileserver setup, Mapnik (with special care), OpenLayers 2 (!). We don't help people if they try to set up a map on their website with OpenLayers 2 because it was the documentation they found first.