MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook/Page Deletion

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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
  • Copyvios
  • Duplicates
  • Project-incompatible pages

Contents

[edit] 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--you will need to delete the whole page and then restore your chosen pages, it is not currently possible to do otherwise.

[edit] 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 still exists but has had some past revisions deleted.

Regardless of its location, clicking on the link will display the revision history. MediaWiki builds from before February 16, 2006 will show the last revision before deletion above the revision history. Each of these can be viewed on its own by choosing the appropriate date and time entry. MediaWiki builds from after February 16, 2006 will display the raw wiki source for the page (with a button below which can render it as it appeared), while those before this date will show the rendered page. Regardless of what version you are using the diff view function is currently not supported for deleted pages.

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).

[edit] 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.

Depending on the version of MediaWiki running the newest revision may become the current revision, so you may need to revert to an earlier revision where all the source pages had already been merged.

[edit] Removing certain revisions

If a page is worth keeping but has information in its edit history that needs to be hidden from the average user, you can usually just check all the boxes except those for the bad revisions. However in the case of a very large page (e.g. Main Page) this is simply not feasible. Rather than manually ticking all the hundreds of checkboxes, simply do the following:

  1. Restore the revisions you want to remove (and only those revisions).
  2. Move the restored revisions to a vacant name (e.g. "RubbishDump")
  3. Delete the page
  4. Go back to the first page and click Restore!

[edit] Local Policies

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