The Kirby Encyclopedia:Deletion policy

The deletion policy describes what is eligible for deletion and what is not. Pages can be immediately deleted if 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 * Unused duplicate images, or images which have been replaced by a higher quality version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

 * Whether a "rough consensus" has been achieved
 * Use common sense and respect the judgment and feelings of wiki participants.
 * When in doubt, don't delete. Excessive and/or unjustified deleting can result in loss of admin powers.

On deleting pages
Here are some guidelines administrators 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) 555-2016 
 * 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 to a, in order to preserve the history. Next, copy the content to the , with an edit comment like (moved content from really silly article title - see the page history of better title for author attribution). The  will then be a redirect with no page history which can be deleted.  would then be changed to redirect to.

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 on Special:UnusedFiles. However, aside from personal images, 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. 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 to ensure they are not accidentally deleted.