Jeff,
I recall investigating the transwiki scheme, and being delighted when you not only picked up the slack, but took it on as a personal mission and cleared the list. At the time, we both did minor research into how it is supposed to work. As it was uncharted territory, and no one else seemed to have any solid understanding of it, it seemed like a good idea then to be deleting the pages.
Since that time, there have been a handful of cases where Wikipedians have recreated a link. Simply not deleting the redirects would prevent that nonsense. It also would give Wikipedians an immediate nice warm fuzzy that their protologism-du-jour found a home somewhere. Redirects do not cascade; they will get the redirect page on Wikipedia to the transwiki page - it will say it is a redirect and not autojump at that point. When they follow the link, they (perhaps) will see what the ultimate link should be.
Deleting the redirects takes up more space in the Wiktionary database. (Not much more, of course.) But the idea of not having to move the history pages around is also appealing. The transwiki history (perhaps) can stay in the transwiki section (especially in the case where a recirect target talk page already exists.)
Could you please stop deleting the transwiki pages for a while? Is there further discussion you would like on the topic, say in beer parlour? (The entries will still be there, easy to find if concensus is that they should ultimately be deleted.) --Connel MacKenzie 17:50, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
next reference would go here