Deleting pages from the wiki

When you attempt to delete a page from the wiki, you are presented with two options: just rename or delete completely. In general, you should always choose delete completely. If you only rename the page into the deleted: namespace, the page still appears in system-generated sitemaps underneath the page's designated parent page and also in system-generated lists of all pages in the site. This is probably not what you want to happen.

There are also two very important "gotchas" that you must avoid when deleting pages from the wiki:

• If the page has any discussion comments (the number in paretheses for the discuss link at the bottom of the page is 1 or greater), the discussion thread isn't really deleted from the system and will slightly mess up some statistics. For example, the total count of all posts in the hidden Per page discussions forum isn't reduced by the number of posts that were in that thread.

• If other pages have links to the page that you deleted, those links will become "broken".

So it's very important to perform all of the following steps, in order, when deleting a page from the wiki:

1. Move the entire discussion thread to the hidden Deleted threads forum.
   1. At the bottom of the page, click discuss.
   2. Just beneath the white-colored summary box of the discussion thread, click +more options > move thread.
   3. In the New category field, select Hidden: Deleted threads.
   4. Click save
2. Return to the page itself. (At the end of the previous step you are no longer on the page itself; you're on a different page that displays the page's discussion thread.) The easiest way to do this is to click the page name at the upper left of the page, just beneath the top menu.
3. At the bottom of the page, click +options > delete.
4. Remove the links to this page from all other dependent pages.
   1. Near the bottom of the Delete page area, click + show dependencies.
   2. If any dependent pages are listed, click the link for each page, edit that page, and remove the links that point to the page that you're about to delete.
5. Now it's safe to delete the page.
   1. At the bottom of the page, click +options > delete.
   2. In the Delete page area, select the delete completely option.
   3. Click delete.