BetaWiki:Deletion policy

The BetaWiki deletion policy defines the circumstances under which is a page eligible for removal and procedures for doing so. Deleting removes the page and its history from public view, however, administrators can still access it and undelete it if required.

Any page can be nominated for deletion by transcluding the Delete template on the very top of the nominated page followingly:. After doing so, a message box appears on the top of the page containing a link to a discussion page, where the deletion request should be explained. See Delete requests/Archived/2018-11-28/Windows 10 build 9622 or Delete requests/Archived/2019-02-18/Windows Longhorn M1 pages for examples of a delete request discussion page. The discussion only serves an advisory role for the administrators and is not an election - a page can still be deleted if more people vote to keep the page, but fail to provide any proper arguments and vice versa.

Deletion should be always used as a last resort option. If editing can improve the page, then this is the preferred course of action as opposed to deleting the page.

Criteria for quick deletion
Quick deletion without prior discussion covers certain chosen situations where there are no doubts that a page should be deleted. This can be done by any administrator without any further notice, other users can flag an article for quick deletion by transluding the QD template at the very top of the page followingly:.

Any BetaWiki page can be quickly deleted if it meets at least one of the following criteria:

General

 * Patent nonsense
 * Test pages (this does not apply to Sandbox or user pages)
 * Pages whose content is unambiguosly beyond BetaWiki's scope
 * Pure vandalism and/or blatant hoaxes (except articles about hoaxes, i.e. fake builds)
 * Pages created by blocked users
 * Pages that don't serve any other purpose than attack their subject
 * Recreation of a page that was deleted after prior discussion
 * Reasonably justified author request, if the particular user is the only editor of said page
 * Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page
 * Blatant advertising and/or promotion
 * Unambiguous copyright infringement
 * Uncontroversial maintenance

Articles

 * Apparent non-encyclopedic content, such as proclamations, mere opinions with no source etc.
 * Extremely short articles, containing only incomplete information out of context
 * Non-English articles
 * Articles that contain no useful content aside from external links, category tags, a rephrasing of the title, and/or images
 * Obviously invented

Redirects

 * Implausible typos
 * Redirects pointing to a non-existent page that can't be fixed by changing the target
 * Cross-namespace redirects

Files

 * Redundant files
 * Corrupt, missing or empty files

Categories

 * Unpopulated categories

User pages

 * User request
 * Nonexistent user
 * Talk pages of anonymous IP users, whose content is no longer relevant

Templates

 * Templates that unambiguously misrepresent established policy
 * Duplicated templates