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• Unused duplicate images, or images which have been replaced by a higher quality version
• Too short (depends on the subject)

In other cases, there are more things to consider.

Deciding whether to delete

1. Whether a "rough consensus" has been achieved
2. Use common sense and respect the judgment and feelings of wiki participants.
3. When in doubt, don't delete.

On deleting pages

Here are some guidelinesadministrators should follow in making the decision to delete a page or not.

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 isnot deleted, put a link to the deletion discussion thread on the talk page.
2. Simply deleting a page doesnot automatically delete its talk page. If you delete these as well, do that first, and then the main page.
3. When filling in the "Reason for deletion" text, ensure that the following isnot included:
   • Any copyright infringing text
   • Personal information, e.g.content was: 'John Doe smells bad and his home phone # is (481) 555-2016
4. Don't delete pages unless you know how to undelete as well.
5. Redirects to deleted pages should be deleted or redirected elsewhere to avoid broken redirects.
6. 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 fromreally silly article title to abetter title, in order to preserve the history. Next, copy the content to theexisting article, with an edit comment like(moved content from really silly article title - see the page history of better title for author attribution). Thereally silly article title will then be a redirect with no page history which can be deleted.Better title would then be changed to redirect toexisting article.

Unused images

Users are supposed to use all images they upload within 24 hours, otherwise they are eligible for deletion. Images that do not appear on any pages automatically get listed onSpecial:UnusedFiles. However, aside frompersonal files, being unused in and of itself is not enough reason for an image to be deleted: the image could indeed be useful somewhere, so it is always good to check before deleting unused files. Additionally, simply saying "unused" is not a valid reason when marking images with {{delete}}. Images are often unused because they were replaced, in which case, the replacement file must be linked to in the delete template and at least named in the deletion log.

Please note that if an image is being URL linked, such as through a user's monobook, then it may appear as an unused image. However these images are supposed to be tagged with {{not-unused}} to ensure they are not accidentally deleted.

Things to remember

• Excessive and/or unjustified deleting can result in loss of admin powers.

See also

• Category:Pages to be deleted
• Deletion log

• Policies