Wikipedia:Undeletion policy

Articles and multimedia are sometimes deleted by administrators if they are thought to have a valid reason for deletion. Usually these decisions are completely correct, and undisputed. Sometimes, they are more controversial. See the Special:Log/delete for a searchable list of deleted pages; see archives for deletions prior to the MediaWiki 1.4 upgrade. See Wikipedia:Deletion review if you are concerned that a page may have been wrongly deleted.

Reasons why an article might be requested for undeletion

• Deletion "out of process"
• If an article was deleted under Wikipedia:Proposed deletion an admin may undelete the article, based on a user contesting the deletion, without further argument (though such articles may still be subject to deletion through the regular process).
• If the article has been wrongly deleted (i.e. that Wikipedia would be a better encyclopedia with the article restored). A request for undeletion on these grounds may happen because someone was not aware of the discussion on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (AFD) or Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion (MFD), or because the article was deleted without being listed on AFD, or because the person making the undeletion request had objected to deletion on bona fide grounds but was improperly ignored.
• Non-sysops who wish to see the content of a deleted article, either to use its content elsewhere, or alternatively, because they cannot tell if it was wrongly deleted without seeing what exactly was deleted. (temporary undeletion)
• To permit a deleted article to be transwikified or properly moved to a sister wiki-site. (temporary undeletion)
• "History only" undeletions can always be performed without needing to list the articles on the votes for undeletion page, and don't need to be kept for a full ten days. Article histories that include copyright infringements should not be undeleted.

To request that a page (or image) be restored

If an article was speedy deleted, this may have been done in error. You may ask any administrator to undelete an article if it has been obviously deleted out of process (no justification under the deletion policy). See the "Exception" section below. An article undeleted in this way may be listed on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion if it still appears to be deletable under the deletion policy. If you cannot persuade an administrator that the deletion was in error, try Wikipedia:Deletion review.

To nominate a page for undeletion, place the page title on Wikipedia:Deletion review, with the reason why you think it should be undeleted. Sign and date your entry (~~~~). If the page was deleted via the Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion or Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion processes rather than speedy deletion, please include a link to the relevant deletion debate, and provide a good reason for overriding the existing debate. Be sure to leave a message on the administrator's talk page informing them that you have nominated a page for undeletion.

Pages that were recently deleted in accordance with deletion policy after being listed on AFD or MD should not be listed unless new information has come to light. If the article was deleted because it was a stub and contained little or no information and you believe you can write a non-trivial non-stub article on the subject, you should be bold and write it, rather than request the stub for undeletion. The speedy deletion criterion for "reposted content that was deleted according to deletion policy " only applies if the content is "substantially identical" (under any article title) — not if you added a lot of new information.

If an article is nominated for undeletion but is kept deleted according to consensus, please do not renominate unless you have significant new information that may convince people to change their minds.

Restoring the page (for admins)

A page listed for undeletion should remain on DRV for at least five days.

After five days, if at least three people and a majority of voters have voted for undeletion, including the person who proposed it, the page may be undeleted by a sysop.

After ten days, if a majority of voters were in favor of undeletion, it should be undeleted; else it should be removed from the page and remain deleted.

When undeleting an article:

1. The undeleting sysop should list the article on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion or Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion (as appropriate), unless the undelete debate suggests this step would be pointless bureaucracy.
2. Further discussion can take place on the AFD/MD page and, after the usual lag period, the undeleted page will either be deleted again or left undeleted.
3. If the deletion was not via AFD/MD, the undeleting sysop should notify the deleting sysop that the page has been undeleted.

If a request to undelete is made, a sysop may choose to undelete the article and protect it blank so that people may look at the article on which they are voting. This is done through use of Template:TempUndelete. If you wish to only view a deleted article, list it in the content review section and say why. A sysop will provide the deleted article to you in some form — either by quoting it in full, or by emailing it to you, or by temporarily undeleting it. See also Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages by sysops.

Exception

If the page was obviously deleted "out of process" (i.e. not in accordance with current deletion policy), then a sysop may choose to undelete immediately. In such a case, the sysop who deleted the page should be informed of the undeletion and the reason for it. If deletion policy dictates that the undeleted page is an AfD candidate, please list it there. If you are unclear as to whether it was out of process or not, the normal undeletion procedure should apply.

Suffrage

Anyone is allowed to give comments or opinions here. However, as with other voting pages, a user's vote may be discounted if that user has a lack of edit history (for instance if the account was created after the DRV nomination, or all the user's edits are related to the article), or the user is a probable sockpuppet. There are no strict rules for this, the admin closing a discussion is expected to use common sense.

Partial undeletion

The MediaWiki software now makes it possible to only undelete selected revisions of a page. When doing such an undeletion, the admin must be very careful to maintain the history requirement of the GFDL. Example cases are mentioned at Wikipedia talk:Undeletion policy.