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Wiktionary: Page deletion guidelines

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Table of contents
1 How to do it
2 What to delete and what to keep
3 Notes to administrators
4 See also:

How to do it

  1. First, read the sections below about what to delete and what to keep. If you feel sure an entry should be deleted:
    1. Add a link to the unwanted page in Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.
    2. Include a brief explanation as to why you think the page should be deleted.
    3. Sign your suggestion for deletion (use four tildes, ~~~~, to sign with your user name and the current date). This will allow people to contact you in case of questions about your proposal.
    4. Put {{rfd}} at the top of the article so that anyone working on the article in the future knows that it may be deleted.
     
  2. Before you list a page for deletion click on "What links here" to see if you would be breaking any links. If so, note this.
     
  3. Wait! If there is no objection to deleting the page, or a clear consensus emerges to delete, an administrator will come along to do the work, and as a part of that work will remove the listing from the request page. A record of the deletion will automatically appear in the Wiktionary:Deletion log.
     
  4. A person who makes excessive good requests for deletion risks being recruited into the ranks of the administrators.

What to delete and what to keep

  1. When in doubt, it is usually better to give the benefit of the doubt to keeping the article. This has a positive effect on the overall communal mental health.
     
  2. Any of the following may be the basis for a deletion request, though there is often a better alternative.
    1. Complete Rubbish: The contents don't make sense or are clearly someone's idea of a joke. If the material is clearly obscene or libellous, you should also edit the page to a blank state. Before you request to delete, try to make sure that the article doesn't fall under "Never heard the word" or "Good title, garbage content" below.
    2. Title misspelled: Move the article to the correct title. If there is already an article at the correct title merge any useful material on there. Occasionally, a misspelling may be so common that it needs to be noted, or it may be an accepted variant spelling of the word. In that case the article should be retained, but reduced to a simple explanation of the situation. In the case of alternate spellings, the substantive article may be under either spelling. Preference should be given to the more common spelling, but where this cannot be determined give preference to the spelling whose article was first created.
    3. Contents have been moved to another project: Depending on the reason for the move, an article for the term may still be warranted, but you are under no obligation to write it, or to save inappropriate material while you wait for someone else to do it. If you make a request to delete it will give some new user a chance to start afresh, though at the expense of losing track of any useful work the original poster may have done. Consider replacing the content with {{stub}} instead.
    4. Never heard the word: That's nice, but maybe someone else has. That's one of the main reasons we have dictionaries in the first place. Try looking up the word in another dictionary, or the British National Corpus. Do a Google search. Incorporate your findings into the page (but don't copy in material from a copyrighted source!), or put them on the talk: page if they're not in polished form. If the word appears to have been made up by the poster, it might be a valid protologism and could be marked as such. If none of these turns up anything, make a request for deletion. If you don't feel like searching, that's fine. Just leave the article alone and someone else will come along and do the research.
    5. Self-promotion: Pages which appear to promote some specific person or entity are discouraged, but should not be removed without time for discussion on Wiktionary:Requests for deletion. Widely-used trademarks are generally OK, since including them in Wiktionary is not likely to have any significant impact. Rare words like hapax legomenon are fine — including them in Wiktionary may well promote their use, but their use doesn't benefit anyone in particular. The main concern is that Wiktionary not be used as a vehicle to promote an otherwise little-known person or entity.
    6. Good title, garbage content: Someone either didn't know what they were doing, or was having their idea of fun.
      1. Check the history. If a legitimate entry has been overwritten, click on the link for that version, click on "Edit", and save with the comment "rv vandalism".
      2. If not, but you can provide a good definition, do so.
      3. Otherwise replace the contents of the article with {{stub}} and the comment "stubbed vandalism".
     
  3. Things to Keep
    1. Stubs: These are not the problem that they are in Wikipedia. Some short short articles are satisfactorily complete when they only describe that a particular word is a variant spelling of another, or that it is an inflected form.
    2. Common misspellings and ungrammatical forms: These should inform the reader of the correct form.
    3. Pages with links from other articles: These should be kept, at least temporarily. If you really feel one should go fix the links before you delete. Broken links from talk pages or even user pages are not as important

Notes to administrators

  1. Administartors have no special status in determining which pages to delete. Their job is to implement the consensus of the community. If you are uncertain about whether there is such a consensus, it is safer to leave it in place.
     
  2. If a solution other than deletion has been found for a page, leave it listed for a short while, with a brief expanation of what has been done. Often the discussion should be moved to the talk page for the article. That way the original poster and others can see why it wasn't deleted, and what happenned to it. This will discourage reposting of the same item.
     
  3. Simply deleting a page does not automatically delete its talk page or any subpages. Please delete these pages first, and then the main page.
     
  4. If you delete a page, note the fact on the request list as well. If nobody complains about the deletion, it can be removed from the request list after a reasonable wait.


See also:

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