Help talk:Deleting a page

This article is not easy to understand or follow. It needs to: detail where the 'delete' link can be found; define what a 'sysop' admin user is; outline how to actually delete the page (as a step by step process). In addition to this the writing needs to be cleaned up to clarify the entire article - in its present state it doesn't read well.

I don't know how to delete a page and therefore am not able to carry out the required edits myself. I've added the comments because as a user needing help I'm still none the wiser.

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perhaps you see no [delete] tab. not all wiki visitors have all rights. see perhaps Help:User_rights for more. -- peblusto 12:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Normal users can just delete the page contents
Theses help pages are targetted primarily at normal wiki users, not sysops. This page can also offer help to wiki sysops, so that they can find out how to perform an actual delete, but this is not the primary purpose of this Help page, and could even be farmed off to another page called "Help:Sysop page delete" or something. Normal users don't have permission to do a page delete.

So how do normal users delete a page? Well on several smaller scale wikis, with less wikipedia style proccesses in place, I've found that the best thing is to advise users to remove the text from the page, and label it as deleted. I know that advice doesn't apply to mediawiki.org, and other wikimedia projects (large wikis) but it is not "completely bogus advice". It is advice based on experience of working with smaller wikis (most wikis where these help pages will get copied to)

To my mind the current page fails to perform its primary function of telling normal users how to do it

Maybe we need the advice on these pages to also be reasonably valid within the mediawiki.org wiki, so I guess that presents a conflict of purposes.

-- Harry Wood 17:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)