NOTICE:
This is a sandbox page.
It is not approved or active policy. It is a draft, and as such, may be incomplete.
When pages are deleted
Articles are removed by Staff for several reasons, with the first two being the most common by far:
(Adjusted) score less than or equal to -10
If a page has no downvotes from deleted users or users whose ban was related to malicious voting on that page, staff may use the displayed score rather than the adjusted score. (This is the case for the vast majority of pages that reach deletion range.) The regular score will be greater than or equal to the adjusted score, and it's easier to determine.
Votes by an article's author(s), rewriter(s), translator(s), and anyone else with an entry in the page's metadata are excluded from this calculation in order to provide a level playing field for individually-written and collaborative articles. Votes from deleted accounts are also excluded; votes from banned accounts are not excluded, except in the case where the user's ban was related to their voting on the article in question. (This is to ensure that malicious downvoting will not result in an article's deletion.) After excluding those votes, the adjusted score is calculated.
Pages which are eligible for rewrite with the rewrite subteam's approval will have a deletion timer of 72 hours in order to allow interested users to make rewrite requests. This timer will be deactivated and the page will no longer be eligible for deletion if the Rewrite Team approves a rewrite request. Other pages may be deleted as soon as they're fully witnessed.
If a page's adjusted score rises to -8 or higher, the deletion will be canceled and all comments witnessing the deletion will be voided. No action with respect to canceling, witnessing, or carrying out deletion will be taken while a page's adjusted score is equal to -9. (This is to prevent repeated deletion attempts while a page's score hovers around -9 to -10.)
Note that non-fiction pages created by members of staff as part of their official duties are exempt from deletion due to score. This includes pages tagged admin, guide, redirect, etc. Pages posted by staff acting in their personal capacity, including SCPs, tales, GoI format pages, essays, etc. are subject to the standard deletion rules.
Rule violations
Articles which violate site rules or policies may be summarily deleted. (To put it another way: if it wasn't supposed to be posted in the first place, it can be summarily deleted.) This includes but is not limited to:
- Blank or incomplete pages
- Unedited or lightly-edited reposts
- Plagiarized content or other license violations
- Out-of-range posts
- Pages posted in non-default categories which don't meet that category's requirements, such as:
- Author pages written by ineligible users
- Unauthorized posting of pages which require authorization, such as themes
- Unparented fragments without an obvious parent (if the parent is obvious, see below)
- Trolling or other malicious posting
- Content produced in whole or part by generative AI, including text or media
- Pages posted when a user is not allowed to post, for reasons such as a site ban, a slow-down order, or ineligibility to join the site
- Violations of the Official Anti-Harassment Policy
In some cases, a deletion timer of 48 hours will be used to allow an author to correct a serious but fixable issue. These cases include:
- Failure to correctly attribute coauthors
In cases where an issue can be fixed easily, staff should do so rather than deleting a page. For example:
- If an unparented fragment is included in an extant page by the same author, that page should be set as its parent.
- If a page is in an incorrect category due to accidental use of a colon in its slug (URL), the colon should be replaced with a hyphen.
- Most violations of the Technical Content Policy, such as accidentally breaking sidebar functionality, should have the offending formatting removed. (In cases where that would not leave a viable page, summary deletion is appropriate.)
- If an image isn't properly attributed or otherwise violates the site's license, the image should be deleted from the Files list and the image tag or component removed from the page's markup.
In any of the above cases, staff should contact the page's author(s) to inform them of the changes that were made and any further actions that may be needed.
Cleanup
Pages created by staff as part of their official duties may be deleted when they are no longer needed. These deletions must be requested by any member of operational staff or higher who is on the team with responsibility for the page, and the requester will be counted as one of the three necessary witnesses.
Special events
In some cases, contests and events such as Wrathcon may include additional circumstances under which participating works can be deleted. These circumstances must be described on the event's page, and pages deleted under special event rules must be witnessed by at least one of that event's marshals or organizers.
Miscellaneous
- Any pages whose content may put the site, its staff, or its users at risk of legal action
- Any pages which present a security risk to the site, its staff, or its users
Self-Deletion
Authors have the ability to delete their own work at any time. This is accomplished by:
- Clicking "Options" at the bottom of the page,
- Clicking "Delete",
- Selecting the checkbox for "Delete Completely."
Be sure to select "Delete Completely," as a failure to do this does not remove the page; it simply renames it to '/deleted:page-url'. After doing so, announce your choice to delete in the most recent Deletions thread.
A final note: deletion is never a punishment
Staff may not delete pages as a punishment. There are actions (such as trolling or plagiarism) which may result in both deletion of a page and Disciplinary action, but a user's works will not be removed as part of an unrelated Disciplinary action.
Questions
Why not exclude votes from banned accounts in the general case, or only count votes from users who are currently members of the site?
Technical limitations. We currently lack a practical way to cross-reference an article's votes against the list of all banned users or site members due to Wikidot limitations. (For cases of brigading, staff will generally have a list of associated accounts readily available.) On the other hand, Wikidot makes it easy to exclude votes from deleted accounts.
If we're able to devise a way to exclude votes from banned accounts or non-members without slowing the deletions process, we will update the rules accordingly.
Why get rid of deletion timers for standard deletions?
The countdown of a deletions timer tended to encourage hurried attempts to fix a sinking page. This rarely succeeded. We want to encourage authors to be patient and to approach revisions unhurriedly.
My article is at -10. Should I delete it myself?
Please do. It is exceptionally rare for an article to move from deletion range to a positive score even after revisions. We recommend deleting the article and, if you want to reuse the concept, taking it through the critique process and rewriting accordingly. Of course, you can also try again with an entirely different concept if you prefer. Please remember to post to the current deletions thread!
Will you delete my page for me?
Staff does not delete pages at their authors' request, but you may delete your own pages if you like. See above for instructions.