Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting

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The administrators' mop and bucket.
The administrators' mop and bucket.

The relevant policy can be found at Wikipedia:Deletion policy.

Part of an administrator's role is to delete pages due to speedy deletion criteria, XfD discussions or articles that have been proposed for deletion.

Deleting a page is relatively easy. Basically, click on the "delete" tab at the top of the page (the tab will only appear if you are an administrator logged in to your account), enter a reason (or edit the automatically supplied reason), and hit delete. On very rare occasions, you might post a note at the Deletion Review page to allow others to review your speedy delete action, but that is not a usual practice. Restoring etiquette is the same as deleting etiquette when done per consensus such as per an XfD. However, if you restore a page without a consensus, it is considered proper to notify the page deleting admin of your actions and the reasons for your actions.

Below are instructions on how to delete and restore pages. Please follow the instructions to delete and then restore Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting/delete.

Contents

Deleting a page

  1. Go to the article you wish to delete, in this case, we will use Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting/delete.
  2. Above the article, you will see tabs, in between history and move you will see - click this button.
  3. Next to reason for deletion, type the reason the page is to be deleted into the box, this should refer to a particular discussion page for XfD's, or a particular criteria for speedy deletion such as A7. You should use an informative reason: "G12" is not helpful, "Speedy deletion per G12- Copyright infringement." is much better. If text from the article already appears in the "reason for deletion" box, please review that text to remove any libelous, attacking, or other personal information which may appear there; otherwise that material will appear in the deletion log, where it is very difficult to remove.
  4. Click the button Delete this page.
  5. All revisions of the page will then be deleted.
    Many pre-loaded deletion rationales can be found using the drop down option (shown here)
    Many pre-loaded deletion rationales can be found using the drop down option (shown here)

Deleting a revision

Under certain circumstances, such as edits involving libel or a user's private information, a particular revision may need to be deleted from history. To do so, delete the page, and selectively tick which revisions you want restoring (you may find it easier to select all the boxes by clicking "invert selection" first, and unclick the bad revisions). Deleted revisions will only be visible to admins.

Please do not use page deletion for this on pages with lengthy histories (over a few thousand revisions) - this will impact the overall performance of Wikipedia. Instead, report these situations to users with the oversight tools - email oversight-l@lists.wikimedia.org (or use Special:Emailuser/Oversight).

Restoring a page

  1. Go to the article you wish to restore, in this case, it is Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting/delete.
  2. Just below the title, you will see "View or restore (one) deleted edit?" - Click on (one) deleted edit.
  3. This will list all the deleted revisions of the article. Next to each revision you will check boxes. If you are wanting to restore all the revisions, leave all the boxes unchecked.
  4. Towards the middle of the screen, there is a box with comment next to it. Type the reason you are going to restore the page into the box.
  5. Click on restore.
  6. The page will then be restored.

Restoring selected revisions

  1. Go to the article Wikipedia:New admin school/Deleting/delete.
  2. Insert an edit in which you will want to avoid restoring after you delete the page.
  3. Repeat steps 2-4 of Deleting a page.
  4. Repeat steps 1-4 of Restoring a page.
  5. In order to restore selected revisions and not restore the edit that needs to be removed from the page history, select the checkboxes only of the edits you need to restore (note: by holding the shift key on your keyboard and selecting one checkbox and the checkboxes above or below it, you can select multiple checkboxes without having to click on each one by one.)
  6. Repeat steps 5-6 of Restoring a page and the revisions you selected from the checkboxes will be restored.

Closing deletion discussions

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