Help talk:Deleting a page

Discuss the Help:Deleting a page page here:

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.


 * 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)


 * Yes. If you can't see the 'delete' link (tab at the top), you are not a "sysop", so your main problem with understanding this page, will be that you are trying to find out how to do something which you are not allowed to do. The page could perhaps be clearer in explaining that you are not allowed to do it, but really I think there's only two little problems remaining with this page:
 * Firstly the page currently doesn't explain what you can do, as a normal user (delete the text contents of the page, and lable it as deleted) This was the section I put at the very top of the page, but as discussed below, it has been removed.
 * Secondly the section which mentions requiring sysop rights, should link to Help:User rights, or some other page. However currently Help:User rights is not a useful page to link to, since it has no basic explaination of what a sysop user is, or you how you might become one. It should explain these things, instead of detailing config variables which belong in the manual (but that's a discussion I'm also having at Help talk:User rights)
 * I guess frustration at not seeing "delete" link is what prompts you to say "writing needs to be cleaned up", I can't see any major writing clean-up type issues. Just the above two things need tackling.
 * --Harry Wood 11:18, 2 January 2008 (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)