Deletion guidelines for administrators

Even sysops should mostly use the Ireland Information Guide:Votes for deletion page when they think a page should be deleted. There are a few, limited, exceptions, which are given at Ireland Information Guide:candidates for speedy deletion. Every sysop should also read and understand Ireland Information Guide:deletion policy.

Once the decision to delete (or not) has been made, please document the decision using the procedures at Ireland Information Guide:Deletion process.

Deciding whether to delete

1. Whether a "rough consensus" has been achieved (see below)
2. Use common sense and respect the judgment and feelings of Ireland Information Guide participants.
3. As a general rule, don't delete pages you nominate for deletion. Let someone else do it.
4. When in doubt, don't delete.

Rough consensus

An aspect of Ireland Information Guide that confounds many people is the fact that there is essentially no formal voting, and informal votes or straw polls are rare. The general rule on disputed topics is that Ireland Information Guide has to come to "rough consensus," meaning that a very large majority of those who care must agree. The exact method of determining rough consensus varies from time to time, case to case, and person to person. The lack of voting has caused some very long delays for some proposals, but most Ireland Information Guide users who have witnessed rough consensus after acrimonious debates feel that the delays often result in better results. (If you think about it, how could you have "voting" in a group you can't count the participants of, and anyone can join?)

(with apologies to the "Tao of IETF" (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3160.txt))

Administrators necessarily must use their best judgement, attempting to be as impartial as is possible for a fallible human, to determine when rough consensus has been reached. For example, administrators can disregard votes and comments if they feel that there is strong evidence that they were not made in good faith. Such "bad faith" votes include those being made by sock puppets, being made anonymously, or being made using a new user id whose only edits are to the article in question and the voting on that article.

On deleting pages

Here are some guidelines administrators should follow in making the decision to delete a page or not, when considering entries on Ireland Information Guide:Votes for deletion.

1. When deleting a page, one may or may not want to delete its talk page or any subpages as well. If not then, depending on the reason for deletion the content of the page to be deleted could be copied to the talk page, to understand what the discussion is about.
2. Simply deleting a page does not automatically delete its talk page or any subpages. If you delete these as well, do that first, and then the main page.
3. If you delete a page, remove its listing from VfD as well.
4. Do not delete a page containing a personal essay or other content from the main article namespace without first posting a copy elsewhere (e.g., in a different namespace or on the Information Guide.com meta (http://meta.Ireland)), unless the content is simply vandalism. Ireland Information Guide is not a repository for all manner of nonsense that happens to be posted. To be clear, however, a good faith attempt to write an encyclopedia article, no matter how poorly worded, biased, or otherwise flawed, will not be considered vandalism.
5. Copyright: See Ireland Information Guide:Copyrights for deletion policy on copyright infringement (and m:Ireland Information Guide and copyright issues and m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia for perspective).
6. Don't delete pages unless you know how to undelete as well! See Ireland Information Guide:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops and Ireland Information Guide:votes for undeletion.
7. Redirects to deleted pages should be deleted or redirected elsewhere to avoid broken redirects.
8. If a given title should never have an article, such as an article on someone very obscure, then remove all links to it, making it an orphan.
9. If a given title should have an article, but the current content is useless, then consider listing it on Ireland Information Guide:requested articles
10. If an article title needs to be deleted but some of the content could be used in a different, existing article, move the page to a better title, copy the content to the existing article with a comment like (moved content from really silly article title - see the page history of better title for author attribution). Then move the really silly article title to better title in order to preserve the history (as this may be required for the GFDL). The Really silly article title will then be a redirect with no page history which can be deleted.

See also

• Deletion policy
• Deletion process
• Undeletion policy