When pages are deleted
The SCP Foundation Wiki is a curated project. Articles are removed from the site for several reasons, the most common of which is a low score based on community voting. Other reasons for removal apply irrespective of score.
(Adjusted) score less than or equal to -10
If a page’s score falls to -10 or lower, an eligible member of staff will post a 24-hour timer in the article's comments. Two additional staff witnesses are required for deletion. Once an article has three witnesses, it will be deleted after the timer expires or the score falls to -20 or lower.
If a page's adjusted score rises to -8 or higher, the deletion will be canceled and all comments witnessing the deletion will be voided. No action with respect to canceling, witnessing, or carrying out deletion will be taken while a page's adjusted score is equal to -9. (This is to prevent repeated deletion attempts while a page's score hovers around -9 to -10.)
Note that pages properly tagged admin, author, guide, more-by, redirect, sandbox, and workbench are exempt from deletion due to score. For more information about these tags and when they may be applied to a page, see the Tag List.
Calculating a page's adjusted score for deletions
If a page has no downvotes from deleted users or users whose ban was related to malicious voting on that page, staff may use the displayed score rather than the adjusted score. (This is the case for the vast majority of pages that reach deletion range.) The regular score will be greater than or equal to the adjusted score, and it's easier to determine.
Votes by an article's author(s), rewriter(s), translator(s), and anyone else with an entry in the page's metadata are excluded from this calculation in order to provide a level playing field for individually-written and collaborative articles. Votes from deleted accounts are also excluded; votes from banned accounts are not excluded, except in the case where the user's ban was related to their voting on the article in question. (This is to ensure that malicious downvoting will not result in an article's deletion.) After excluding those votes, the adjusted score is calculated.
Rule violations
Articles which violate site rules or policies may be deleted. (To put it another way: if it wasn't supposed to be posted in the first place, it can be deleted.) This includes but is not limited to:
- Blank or incomplete pages
- Unedited or lightly-edited reposts
- Plagiarized content or other license violations
- Out-of-range posts
- Pages posted which don't meet the requirements for that page type, such as:
- Author pages written by ineligible users
- Unauthorized posting of pages which require authorization, such as themes
- Unparented fragments without an obvious parent (if the parent is obvious, see below)
- Trolling or other malicious posting
- Content produced in whole or part by generative AI, including text or media
- Pages posted when a user is not allowed to post, for reasons such as a site ban, a slow-down order, or ineligibility to join the site
- This reason for deletion will not apply to articles posted prior to the passing of this policy unless a majority of active site admins vote to apply it to a given article.
- Violations of the Official Anti-Harassment Policy
- Any pages whose content may put the site, its staff, or its users at risk of legal action
- Any pages which present a security risk to the site, its staff, or its users
In some cases, a deletion timer of 48 hours will be used to allow an author to correct a serious but fixable issue. These cases include:
- Failure to correctly attribute coauthors
In cases where an issue can be fixed easily, staff should do so rather than deleting a page. For example:
- If an unparented fragment is included in an extant page by the same author, that page should be set as its parent.
- If a page is in an incorrect category due to accidental use of a colon in its slug (URL), the colon should be replaced with a hyphen.
- Most violations of the Technical Content Policy, such as accidentally breaking sidebar functionality, should have the offending formatting removed. (In cases where that would not leave a viable page, deletion is appropriate.)
- If an image isn't properly attributed or otherwise violates the site's license, the image should be deleted from the Files list and the image tag or component removed from the page's markup.
In any of the above cases, staff should contact the page's author(s) to inform them of the changes that were made and any further actions that may be needed.
Cleanup
Pages created by staff as part of their official duties may be deleted when they are no longer needed. These deletions must be requested by any member of operational staff or higher who is on the team with responsibility for the page, and the requester will be counted as one of the three necessary witnesses.
Special events
In some cases, contests and events such as Wrathcon may include additional circumstances under which participating works can be deleted. These circumstances must be described on the event's page, and pages deleted under special event rules must be witnessed by at least one of that event's marshals or organizers.
Self-Deletion
Authors have the ability to delete their own work at any time. This is accomplished by:
- Clicking "Options" at the bottom of the page,
- Clicking "Delete",
- Selecting the checkbox for "Delete Completely."
Be sure to select "Delete Completely," as a failure to do this does not remove the page; it simply renames it to '/deleted:page-url'. After doing so, announce your choice to delete in the most recent Deletions thread.
A final note: deletion is never a punishment
Staff may not delete pages as a punishment. There are actions (such as trolling or plagiarism) which may result in both deletion of a page and Disciplinary action, but a user's works will not be removed as part of an unrelated Disciplinary action.
Questions
How many members of staff must witness a deletion?
All deletions carried out by staff as part of their official duties must be witnessed by at least three staff members. The deleter may be one of the three witnesses.
Users deleting their own pages don't require witnesses. They can simply delete the relevant page and then make the announcement in the Deletions thread as described above.
When are deletions timers used?
Deletions timers are only used for deletions due to score (while the score in the -10 to -19 range) and in the rare case of failure to credit coauthors. In all other cases, articles may be deleted as soon as they've received the necessary witnesses.
Why not exclude votes from banned accounts in the general case, or only count votes from users who are currently members of the site?
Technical limitations. We currently lack a practical way to cross-reference an article's votes against the list of all banned users or site members due to Wikidot limitations. (For cases of brigading, staff will generally have a list of associated accounts readily available.) On the other hand, Wikidot makes it easy to exclude votes from deleted accounts.
If we're able to devise a way to exclude votes from banned accounts or non-members without slowing the deletions process, we will update the rules accordingly.
My article is at -10. Should I delete it myself?
Please do. It is exceptionally rare for an article to move from deletion range to a positive score even after revisions. We recommend deleting the article and, if you want to reuse the concept, taking it through the critique process and rewriting accordingly. Of course, you can also try again with an entirely different concept if you prefer.
Please remember to post to the current deletions thread if you delete your article!
Can I have a copy of my deleted article's source?
If a deleted article's text doesn't violate site rules, staff will attempt to include the article source with the deletion PM. This is done on a best-effort basis. Staff does not keep copies of every deleted article. You are ultimately responsible for keeping a copy of your article's source code.
Will you delete my page for me?
Staff does not delete pages at their authors' request, but you may delete your own pages if you like. See above for instructions. Alternatively, if you no longer want to be associated with a page that you've created, staff can anonymize it. Contact a member of site staff for more information.