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:
Score less than or equal to -10
Votes by an article's author(s) 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.)
Pages which are eligible for rewrite will have a deletion timer of 48 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.
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
- 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 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 readers
The deletions process
When a page is eligible for deletion for any reason, the deletion tag (or in-deletion) will be added (blah blah first user witnesses and tags)
When the third member of staff witnesses a page as being eligible for deletion and any applicable timers have elapsed, they should do one of two things:
1. If they have the applicable permissions (mod tools/admin) and feel comfortable doing so, they should carry out the deletion.
2. Otherwise, they should remove the in-deletion tag and tag the page as deletable. This lets other would-be witnesses know that they can skip the page while letting anyone who's running deletions know that the page is ready to be deleted.
Witnessing a deletion
TODO
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 (something about how only pages directly associated with rule violations will be deleted.)
Questions
Why not exclude votes from banned accounts in the general case?
Technical limitations. We currently lack a practical way to cross-reference an article's votes against the list of all banned users due to Wikidot limitations. (For cases of brigading, staff will generally have a list of associated accounts readily available.)
Can staff delete a page without witnesses if it's malicious or contains policy-violating content?
No. Staff can unilaterally blank such a page, as well as locking it (if the member of staff is an administrator or an operational staff member with mod tools.)
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?
It's probably a good idea, yeah. 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.
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.