Wikipedia:Deletion policy
Wikipedia administrators have the ability to permanently delete articles within the system. Administrators necessarily must use their best judgment in making this decision.
While we have given the administrator password out to a number of people, at present, November, 2001, we have asked that only Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and Tim Shell actually delete articles. In the future we might add a small number of particularly trusted, responsible members to this list.
The UseModWiki software permanent deletion command deletes not just the present text of an article (which is something that anyone can do--but also something that anyone can restore) but also the article's history, which makes the article impossible to restore from within the system. Hence, the decision to permanently delete an article is not to be taken lightly.
Here are some rules that those tasked with deleting articles can generally be expected to follow in making the decision to delete or not:
- When in doubt, don't delete.
- Do not delete anything that might in the future become an encyclopedia topic. Hence, just because someone has written a completely worthless article about John Doe, that doesn't mean we should permanently delete the topic, John Doe, from the database.
- Do not delete anything that might possibly be a common misspelling of a title. Redirect those pages to the correct spelling. (This can actually result in higher traffic to the website. E.g., if philisophy is created, we might as well just redirect it to philosophy, since "philisophy" is one of the common misspellings of "philosophy.")
- Generally speaking, delete pages that