> The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

The system works if the sources remain available, and in an environment predisposed to link rot that can be a problem. Imagine the hypothetical situation of archive.org disappearing overnight? Should we then delete all pages with it as their sole source if they're not updated within a week?

And the system works if intentions are pure - it seems here the user that suggested the deletion of several Perl related pages is a fan of film festivals[1] and clearly wasn't happy that the "White Camel Award" is a Perl award, since the late 90s, and not a film festival award (since the early 00s). At least according to Google. So they went on a bit of a rampage against Perl articles on Wikipedia.

You could argue "editor doing their job", but I would argue "conflict of interest".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahara_Internatio... # amongst many in their edit history