How to delete pages on a MediaWiki website

At times, while a wiki grows and grows and the amount of pages on the wiki increases (which should be a good sign of a healthy wiki!), there are times that you need to get rid of some of its pages, either because it is vandalism, not relevant to the wiki, or violates some of the wiki's policies. This article will show you how to delete a page on a MediaWiki website.

Step 1. Have the user rights needed to delete a page
You normally require administrator privileges in order to delete a page. If you don't have that flag, you can ask a local bureaucrat to appoint you as one, or you should probably just ask another administrator to do it for you.

Step 2. Open the page that you want to delete
Pretty straightforward. You should know the name of the page you want to delete before you delete it!

Step 3. Open the deletion box
This can be accomplished by adding  to the end of the page's URL (or   if   is already used in the URL). If you're on Wikipedia, there should be a "More" drop-down menu next to the page history link - that contains a "Delete" button. If you're on Wikia, click on the drop-down menu beside the Edit button, and the "Delete" button should be there.

Step 4. Provide a reason for deleting the page
Deleting a page automatically deletes all revisions made to the page. The next step would be to provide a reason for deleting the page. This reason will be shown to anyone who attempts to view the deleted page, and is recorded in the deletion log. By default, the MediaWiki software should pre-fill the delete reason box with "content was: ". You can use the drop-down menu to use some pre-defined delete reasons (you can edit these reasons in MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown), which is attached to the beginning of your reason.

Note: If the page you are deleting contains inappropriate content or language, you may want to remove the "content was: ..." part, so the unwanted language isn't publicly recorded in the deletion log.

Step 5. Click "Delete"
Self-explanatory.

This will delete the page immediately, all revisions becoming hidden to the public.