Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-23780813-20130727054130/@comment-5643552-20130728005117

Michael pasta stories wrote: A file is like deleting saved files that you don't really need.

Actually, it's more like a photo, video, or other media. Pages in the "File:" namespace generally consist of things like the images and videos you see on many pages, but also things like .ogg files. Many of these files are not used on any pages and are usually lost and forgotten, hence why they need to be deleted.