MarioWiki:Deletion policy

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

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 guidelines sysops 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 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. 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 is not included:
 * 4) * Any copyright infringing text
 * 5) * Personal information, e.g.  content was: 'John Doe smells bad and his home phone # is (481) 555-2416 
 * 6) Don't delete pages unless you know how to undelete as well.
 * 7) Redirects to deleted pages should be deleted or redirected elsewhere to avoid broken redirects.
 * 8) 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.
 * There is a mass-delete function that matches pages to a DPL query, and those to not be deleted can be unchecked if necessary. See parameters for page selection for available options.
 * Excessive and/or unjustified deleting can result in loss of sysop powers.