Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-18736543-20140129212749/@comment-10950063-20140129225939

Housekeeping is usually used for when we're cleaning out a specific genre. I'm guessing you've been getting a lot of these messages from video game pastas? That's one that has had a lot of work on it.

Housekeeping is vague, but it's useful for batch deletions. Batch deletions are when someone with deletion powers basically makes a list of what needs to be deleted and then runs a little bit of code that deletes them all at once. One story might be deleted because it's cliche, another because it wasn't good, it could be a duplicate page or any number of reasons. So, it's common for it to be put under the blanket reason of "housekeeping." It's safe to assume that housekeeping usually means either the story was cliche or it didn't meet quality standards.

There's no real way to explain housekeeping on a deletion page. Deletion pages are automatically generated and, again, housekeeping is a blanket term, so it could mean different things.