Deletion Policy
Generally articles may be immediately deleted when they are either
- Pages created just to vandalize or disrupt
- Patent nonsense (total gibberish)
- Unused duplicate images
- Too short (depends on the subject)
In other cases, there are more things to consider.
Deciding whether to delete
- Whether a "rough consensus" has been achieved
- Use common sense and respect the judgment and feelings of Wiki participants.
- When in doubt, don't delete.
On deleting pages
Here are some guidelines sysops should follow in making the decision to delete a page or not.
- When deleting a page, one may or may not want to delete its talk page or any subpages as well. If the talk page is not deleted, put a link to the deletion discussion thread on the talk page.
- Simply deleting a page does not automatically delete its talk page. If you delete these as well, do that first, and then the main page.
- When filling in the "Reason for deletion" text, ensure that the following is not included:
- Any copyright infringing text
- Personal information, e.g. content was: 'John Doe smells bad and his home phone # is (481) 555-2016
- Don't delete pages unless you know how to undelete as well.
- Redirects to deleted pages should be deleted or redirected elsewhere to avoid broken redirects.
- If an article title needs to be deleted, but some of the content could be used in a different (existing) article, proceed as follows: move the article from really silly article title to a better title, in order to preserve the history. Next, copy the content to the existing article, with an edit comment like (moved content from really silly article title - see the page history of better title for author attribution). The really silly article title will then be a redirect with no page history which can be deleted. Better title would then be changed to redirect to existing article.
Things to remember
- Articles & other pages can be undeleted, however once images are deleted, they are completely lost, including all past versions. Please take this into consideration when thinking about deleting an image. Also see the talk page for protocol when an image is unused.
- Excessive and/or unjustified deleting can result in loss of sysop powers.