User:Hex/Notes/Changes to policies and processes
Wikipedia has no coherent record of how and when changes to policy have occurred. Many changes have been entirely forgotten.
User talk pages, deletion thereof
The text "As a matter of practice User talk pages are generally not deleted" was added to Wikipedia:User pages on 15 February 2006 and survives in modified form today at WP:DELTALK.
Until 2010 there was a habit of deleting the talk pages of indefinitely blocked users, without any formal policy basis. Discussions in early 2008 led to the deletion of a template used to tag "temporary" user talk pages, but people kept adding the pages by hand into a category for it, until that was finally deleted in 2010.