Help:Administrator's Handbook/Delete

Sometimes it is necessary to completely remove a page from the wiki, rather than just fix it or redirect it elsewhere.

Once you have become a sysop one of the first things you will notice is a brand-new "delete" tab at the top of most pages in addition to the normal ones. This will take you to a deletion prompt.

Once there, fill in the explanation and click "Delete page". Some versions of MediaWiki have a "Yes, I really want to delete this" checkbox, so tick that before clicking delete otherwise it will not work.

What should be deleted depends on the project's inclusion rules, but generally:
 * Newbie test pages
 * Vandal pages
 * Spam pages
 * Copyright Violations
 * Duplicates
 * Incompatible pages

Deleting specific revisions
If you wish to delete only some revisions of a page--for example someone's private contact details or a copyright violation--find the revision you want to delete and click on it, copy the revision number from the url (it will be the number string at the end of the address) and go to Special:HideRevision and paste the number in. Be sure to give a good reason why you removed the revision. Note that you can only delete one revision at a time.

Restoring some or all deleted revisions
Once a page has been deleted it is invisible to normal users, but admins visiting that same "no such article" page will also see a line at the top saying " View or restore ## deleted edits? ". This line also appears on the revision history page if the page was previously deleted and some revisions were not restored.

Regardless of its location, clicking on the link will display the revision history.

If you want to restore all deleted revisions merely click "Restore!", but if you want to exclude specific revisions you will need to check the boxes of every revision other than those ones before clicking Restore, at the moment there is no "restore all but selected" option. For pages that have had a lot of edits this can be a laborious process.

Revision restoration does not have to happen all at once however, and even multiple admins can simultaneously restore edits of the same page (although they will encounter some errors if they both select a matching revision).

Merging page histories
Sometimes when merging pages it is desirable to merge their edit histories together rather than simply using redirects. In this case you will need to delete the page in question, move one of the source pages over top of it, delete the page again, move the next over top, etc. etc. etc. Once completed simply restore all the revisions by clicking the history tab and going through the procedure described above.

You may need to revert to an earlier revision where all the source pages had already been merged.