Difference between revisions of "Help:Sysop deleting and undeleting"

Latest revision as of 21:37, 12 January 2010

Deleting a page is a straightforward operation for anyone with sysop permissions. Users without such permissions can still remove text from wiki pages, or propose/request that a page should be deleted. See Help:Deleting a page.

Before deleting

Sysops should also be aware of the general advice given on Help:Deleting a page (In particular, note that there are many situations where a deleting is too drastic. Often a redirect is more appropriate for example)

Before deleting you could perform various checks:

• Use the "What links here" tool. This gives an indication as to how important a page is, and what subjects it relates to. Perhaps the page is still linked to prominently from many places. All incoming links will become red links if you proceed with the delete. Ideally all incoming links should be changed/removed, if there is genuinely no need for this page to exist. You could do this work prior to deleting, or ask others in the wiki community to do it.
• Check the page history and the associated talk page. Who was proposing the deletion? Does anyone disagree? Has it been properly discussed? Did people have adequate time to raise objections? Did somebody vandalise a page, which then led to a deletion proposal?

The care taken over these things might depend on the size of the wiki community, and how clear-cut the case for deletion is. Remember that only sysop users can undo a delete action, so to a normal user the information appears to be lost forever.

Use the 'delete' tab

Sysops should see a 'delete' tab at the top of every page. Click this to delete the page. You will be asked to confirm, and to supply a "Reason for deletion". This is a short textual description of why the page is being deleted. Your action will appear on the recent changes display, and in the deletion log (Special:Log).

Undeleting

To undelete a page you must navigate to the exact page name of the page. You can find this in the deletion log (Special:Log) if you dont remember it.

You should then see a link to "View or restore n deleted edits". Tick the box next to the revision you wish to restore.

Configuring deletion reasons

The list of reasons in the dropdown box is maintained at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown.

Template

Syntax

{{Languages|PageName}}

• PageName (optional) - the name of the page to display language links for. If omitted then the English version of the current page is used. This parameter can normally be omitted, as it is only required if you want to link to a page other than the one you place the template on, which is very uncommon. If this parameter is used on a sub-page make sure you supply the root name, not the full page name (e.g. on MediaWiki/fr you would need to use {{Languages|MediaWiki}} and not {{Languages|MediaWiki/fr}}).

Usage

The template should only be placed on pages that exist in more than one language, and it should be placed in the same location on each translation of the page.

The English version of a page is always the main version, with all other languages as sub-pages, named using the appropriate language code (see below).

For example, on the Main Page you would include the text {{Languages}}, both on Main Page itself, and on each of its language sub-pages. The template automatically creates links to any language sub-pages that exist, e.g. Main Page/ja<tt>, <tt>Main Page/fr, and ignores non-existant languages.

See Project:Language policy for further details about translating pages.

Supported languages

This shows you the name of each language's sub-page (using Main Page as an example). Other languages may be added easily as necessary. Please use the appropriate prefix, as used on Wikipedia when adding a new language. Please do not add languages for which no pages exist yet, as this will increase the time needed to include the template without adding any benefit (languages are only displayed to the user when the relevant page exists).

The link on the language names goes to the Wikipedia in that language. If no Wikipedia in your language exists, do not add pages in that language to MediaWiki.org! This wiki is not the place for language advocacy - please go through the correct channels, and once your language has a Wikipedia then please return to add content here.

Example

Here is how the language bar looks on the MediaWiki page: Template loop detected: Template:Languages