Wikipedia:Deletion policy
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Only administrators have the technical ability to delete pages, categories, and images. Sometimes, pages can be deleted immediately. Other times, the deletion should be talked about with other editors.
Sometimes, creating a redirect to an existing article is an adequate solution to requesting deletion, if the article title is helpful for finding information.
The admin that deletes a page takes care that internal links are not broken.
Contents |
[edit] Immediate deletion
Administrators must always check the page's edit history to see if the page can be reverted to some earlier version.
These types of pages can be deleted immediately:
- Pages posted as pure vandalism.
- Obvious nonsense/gibberish ("This website is KEWL!" or "SDWEWE$T%E%$") or user tests
- Confirmed copyright violations
- Self-promotion, such as advertisements or "vanity" pages.
- Articles created to either directly attack ("Jimbo Wales is stupid.") or disparage the subject, where no sources are cited and where there is no good revision to revert to.
- Images uploaded in violation of the Wikipedia:Image use policy.
- Pages copied directly from any other Wikimedia project, where little or no attempt was made to make it work on Simple English.
- Very short articles which are not Wikipedia:Core articles, especially those containing no wikilinks, interwiki, category, or stub notice.
If you are not sure if something is a copyright violation, blank the page and list it on Wikipedia:Requests for deletion.
[edit] Discussed deletion
Some pages should be discussed for seven (7) days before deletion. List these on Wikipedia:Requests for deletion:
- Pages that fall under Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
- Pages directly copied from other Wikipedias, including those that are untranslated (non-English) or un-simplified.
[edit] Pages that should not be deleted
- Those that appear on any internally agreed article lists (Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have) or word lists (Basic English). Pages listed should be fixed, not deleted.
- Redirects which represent common word misspellings.
[edit] Logging
- All deleted pages are listed in the deletion log.
This should be archived when it gets too large. A link to the archive must be made on Wikipedia talk:Deletion log.
[edit] Undeletion
If you believe something was deleted unnecessarily, contact an administrator for assistance.