Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators

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✔ This page documents an English Wikipedia deletion guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.
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Even admins should mostly use the Wikipedia:Proposed deletion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion pages when they think a page should be deleted. There are a few limited exceptions, which are given at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion. Every admin should also read and understand Wikipedia:Deletion policy.

Once the decision to delete (or not) has been made, please document the decision using the procedures at Wikipedia:Deletion process.

Contents

Deciding whether to delete

  1. Whether consensus has been achieved by determining a "rough consensus" (see below)
  2. Use common sense and respect the judgment and feelings of Wikipedia participants.
  3. As a general rule, don't close discussions or delete pages whose discussions you've participated in. Let someone else do it.
  4. When in doubt, don't delete.

Rough consensus

Administrators necessarily must use their best judgment, attempting to be as impartial as is possible for a fallible human, to determine when rough consensus has been reached. For example, administrators can disregard opinions and comments if they feel that there is strong evidence that they were not made in good faith. Such "bad faith" opinions include those being made by sock puppets, being made anonymously, or being made using a new user id whose only edits are to the article in question and the voting on that article. If a rough consensus holds that the nomination was made in bad faith, the page may be speedily kept.

Consensus is not determined by counting heads, but by looking at strength of argument, and underlying policy (if any). Arguments that contradict policy, are based on opinion rather than fact, or are logically fallacious, are frequently discounted. For instance, if someone finds the entire page to be a copyright violation, a page is always deleted. If an argument for deletion is that the page lacks sources, but an editor adds the missing references, said argument is no longer relevant.

Wikipedia policy, which requires that articles and information be verifiable, avoid being original research, not violate copyright, and be written from a neutral point of view is not negotiable, and cannot be superseded by any other guidelines or by editors' consensus. A closing admin must determine whether any article violates policy, and where it is very unlikely that an article on the topic can exist without breaching policy, it must be respected above individual opinions.

Biographies of living people

An important rule of thumb when including biographical articles about living persons in Wikipedia is "do no harm".

With regards to living people, a closing admin must take into account our policy, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons (Note - these are presently under discussion):

  • When closing an AfD about living persons whose notability is ambiguous, the closing administrator should take into account whether the subject of the article being deleted has asked that it be deleted. The degree of weight given to such a request is left to their discretion.
  • There is currently debate whether no consensus should automatically be considered "Delete" by default rather than "Keep" for BLPs, but at present this has not been decided.

On deleting pages

Here are some guidelines administrators should follow in making the decision to delete a page or not, when considering entries on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

  1. 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.
  2. Simply deleting a page does not automatically delete its talk page (or any subpages). If you wish to delete these as well, do them first, and then the main page.
  3. Follow the deletion process to mark as closed and to archive the discussion.
  4. See Wikipedia:Copyrights for deletion policy on copyright infringement, and m:Wikipedia and copyright issues and m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia for perspective.
  5. 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: '{{delete}} XYZ smells bad and his home phone # is (123) 456-7890
  6. Don't delete pages unless you know how to undelete as well! See Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops and Wikipedia:Deletion review.
  7. Redirects to deleted pages should be deleted or redirected elsewhere to avoid broken redirects.
  8. If a given title should never have an article, such as an article on someone very obscure, then remove all links to it.
  9. If a given title should have an article, but the current content is useless, then consider listing it on Wikipedia:Requested articles
  10. 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 (as this may be required for the GFDL). 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.
  11. If closing the discussion in favor of keeping the page, please add a notice to its talk page containing a link to the archived discussion for future reference. In the case of articles you can use {{Oldafdfull}}. (Similar templates needed for other types of pages for deletion.)

Category deletion

Here are some guidelines administrators should follow in making the decision to delete a page or not, when considering entries on Wikipedia:Categories for discussion (commonly abbreviated as WP:CFD, CFD, or cfd).

  1. Ensure the category was properly tagged and listed on WP:CFD. You may consider reading the specific discussion found on the CFD day page to ensure it was properly listed for deletion.
  2. Follow the deletion process to mark as closed and to archive the discussion.
  3. Don't delete categories unless you know how to undelete as well! See Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops and Wikipedia:Deletion review.
  4. If there is a talk page associated with the category, delete it first. If you are renaming the category, move the talk page to the new category talk, and then delete the redirect. Consider checking for any double redirects and fix them as appropriate.
  5. If merging or renaming, consider checking "What links here" before deleting the category, and fixing any articles, portals, or relevant talk pages to point to the new category name.
  6. There is no merge with categories. After the articles and sub-cats have been moved, delete the category.
  7. Sometimes there is a request to leave the category as a redirect. Standard redirects do not work with categories, instead use {{categoryredirect}}. Instructions for where it should be redirected should be on the CFD day page.
  8. If the category was renamed or merged, be sure to check What links here for any "hard linked" pages. Fix the category links on pages such as Portals, articles or other categories to the new name of the category. Talk pages should be changed per basis, as sometimes it may change the outcome of the discussion.

How to rename categories

In five easy steps:

  1. edit the existing category and copy the contents (minus the cfd template)
  2. paste the contents into the new category (sometimes supercats need a sort key depending on the rename)
  3. move the talk page if there is one (and delete the resultant redirect)
  4. replace the existing category with a categoryredirect using Template:category redirect and which should alert a daemon to move all the subcats and articles (or just recat by hand for a sparsely populated category)
  5. when empty, delete the original category referencing the CFD discussion page in the delete summary (or leave a categoryredirect per your discretion)

Not hard, just a little time consuming. Deleting a category is harder since (without assistance from a bot) the references have to be deleted by hand.

Version deletion

Main article: Wikipedia:Selective deletion

An administrator can delete some revisions of an article while leaving all remaining ones intact. The effect of this procedure is that the deleted revisions will not show in the page history and will be available only to administrators. Technically, this is accomplished by completely deleting the article and then undeleting only some revisions, so that the other ones remain deleted (this is the simplest method but has some drawbacks; see Wikipedia:Selective deletion for a more complex but better solution).

Because of GFDL requirements, selective deletion should only be done in certain extreme circumstances. Situations where such a selective deletion might be warranted include copyright violations that occur only in certain revisions, or personally identifying information that has been deemed inappropriate by consensus.

Libel in edit summaries

Since the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, various IP addresses and accounts have been making vandalistic edits using large, libelous edit summaries. At this time, the only way to remove these edit summaries is to delete the entire article, and select each of the non-libelous revisions to be undeleted.

The libel vandal(s) have been hitting pages with huge edit histories, such as George W. Bush and Wikipedia:Deletion review. It takes an enormous amount of time to remove bad edit summaries from these pages, during which the actual page is unavailable. This process also puts a strain on the servers, temporarily slowing access to Wikimedia projects.

Please do not delete pages with long edit histories for this purpose. Instead, ask a developer or an oversight to delete the specific oldids.

Protecting deleted pages

Main article: Wikipedia:Protected deleted pages

Pages that are repeatedly re-created after deletion in unencyclopedic form or against policy can be protected from further re-creation. This practice is commonly known as "padlocking", salting the earth, or simply 'salting'. This is done by one of the following:

  • protecting the page as a redirect to another article,
  • deleting the page and protecting it (preferred).

Before it was possible to protect a page that did not exist, or was deleted, common practice was to transclude the article onto a page with cascading protection enabled, such as Wikipedia:Protected titles.

See also