Help:Deletion and undeletion

Deleting a page is a straightforward operation for anyone with sysop permissions. Users without such permissions can still remove text from wiki pages, or propose/request that a page should be deleted. See Help:Deleting a page.

Before deleting
Sysops should also be aware of the general advice given on Help:Deleting a page. (It should be noted that, in particular, there are many situations where a deleting is too drastic. For example, a redirect is often more appropriate).

Before deleting you could perform various checks:
 * Use the "What links here" tool. This gives an indication as to how important a page is, and what subjects it relates to. Perhaps the page is still linked to prominently from many places. All incoming links will become red links if you proceed with the delete. Ideally all incoming links should be changed/removed, if there is genuinely no need for this page to exist. You could do this work prior to deleting, or ask others in the wiki community to do it.
 * Check the page history and the associated talk page. Who was proposing the deletion? Does anyone disagree? Has it been properly discussed? Did people have adequate time to raise objections? Did somebody vandalise a page, which then led to a deletion proposal?

The care taken over these things might depend on the size of the wiki community, and how clear-cut the case for deletion is. Remember that only sysop users can undo a delete action, so to a normal user the information appears to be lost forever.

Use the 'delete' action
Sysops should see a 'delete' tab or action menu option at the top of every page. Click this to delete the page. When using browsers which support keyboard shortcuts, you can also use (Control-Alt-D). You will be asked to confirm, and to supply a "Reason for deletion". This is a short textual description of why the page is being deleted. Your action will appear on the recent changes display, and in the deletion log (Special:Log).

Undeleting
To undelete a page you must navigate to the exact page name of the page. You can find this in the deletion log (Special:Log) if you dont remember it.

You should then see a link to "View or restore n deleted edits". Tick the box next to the revision you wish to restore.

After a page is deleted, it will be unprotected. You will probably want to re-protect it if there had been a reason to protect it in the first place.

Configuring deletion reasons
The list of reasons in the dropdown box is maintained at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown.