Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages

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It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

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WP:Restore

Only administrators, checkusers, and oversighters can view the content of deleted pages. This is considered necessary because deleted pages may contain copyright violations, personal information, libel, and so forth, and making such material publicly available could be illegal. Administrators can also restore deleted pages if necessary; oversighters and checkusers who are not administrators cannot do this.^[a]

Viewing a list of recent page deletions

Chronological: Special:Log/delete shows the 50 most recent deletions by default; it can be searched by username, by pagename, or by both at once. Wikipedia:Deletion log and its archives record deletions before the MediaWiki 1.4 upgrade.

Viewing a user's deleted edits

Administrators, checkusers, and oversighters can view a user's deleted edits at Special:DeletedContributions.

Viewing and restoring deleted pages

Deleted pages look like this to administrators.

The procedure at Wikipedia:Undeletion policy should be followed before undeleting a page, unless the initial deletion is considered 'out-of-process', in which case immediate undeletion may occur. Undeletions associated with page moves/merges may occur immediately without the need to list the page on Deletion Review.

There are at least three ways for users with the appropriate permissions to access a deleted page and its page history (the list and the old versions themselves):

To directly access the deleted revisions of a page, type "Special:Undelete/<_target>" in the search box, where "<_target>" is the name of the desired page.
Going to Special:Undelete without specifying a _target brings up a search box, which can be used much like Special:Prefixindex.
If a page has been deleted, then administrators who click on the resulting red link get a link to "View or restore x deleted edits?" above the notice that the page does not exist (Monobook skin). (Oversighters and checkusers who are not administrators get a message that says "View x deleted edits?", since they cannot restore deleted edits.) For example, see intentionally permanent red link. This does not apply if a new page with the same name has been created after the deletion; in this case, the link will appear on the page's history.

This produces:

If the page has recently been deleted: the deletion report (who deleted it, when and why). If the page was deleted after 23 December 2004 (the date of the MediaWiki 1.4 upgrade), all deletions and restorations will appear.
If the page has not been restored yet: the deleted page history.

To undelete all revisions, simply press the Restore button. To undelete selected revisions, select the checkbox that appears next to each revision that you want to restore, then press the Restore button. To undelete a swath of contiguous revisions, click the checkbox for the top-most revision you wish to undelete, then hold the Shift key when clicking the checkbox for the bottom-most revision; thus, all checkboxes between the two revisions will be selected. If a new page with the same name has been created since the deletion, the restored revisions will appear in the prior history, and the current revision of the live page will not be automatically replaced.

The resulting page history does not show the deletion and restoration themselves. If a new page with the same name had been created, this shows up as if the last deleted version was modified to the first version of the new page.

Special:Log/delete is a full record of when, why, and by whom each page was deleted. It also records undeletions and the number of restored revisions.

Undeleting images and other media

In the case of uploaded media, a similar procedure applies as that above. The Page history section shows the different versions of the text attached to the image, while the File history section contains the versions of the image itself.

You can restore particular versions of both histories by selecting them with the checkboxes; if no checkbox is selected, all versions will be restored. Images deleted before 16 June 2006 cannot be restored, as they were not retained by MediaWiki before that date.^[b]

Multiple deletions

If after a deletion a page with the same name is created and that is also deleted, then the revision histories are combined, and all deletions or restorations are shown on the undeletion page. It is still possible to select individual revisions to restore.

Storage of deleted revisions

When a page is deleted, its text remains in the text table but its metadata (e.g. its deleted revision history) is moved from the revision table to the archive table, which was created on 10 August 2002. Page text was also stored in the archive table until Wikipedia was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5 in June 2005.^[c]

Previous revision deletion actions

Revision deletion actions (including those by oversighters in "Suppression" mode) are retained even when the page is deleted in the traditional manner. The RevisionDelete functionality continues to be available on the page history section of the undeletion page; administrators using the tool here have no practical effect, but oversighters may continue to suppress revisions as needed. If a page is later undeleted, data that was deleted with RevisionDelete will still remain deleted.

Notes

^ While there is no formal requirement that oversighters and checkusers also be administrators, the Arbitration Committee has traditionally restricted applications to those who are currently administrators.
^ For more details, see this story in the Wikipedia Signpost.
^ A message by Wikipedia system administrator Brion Vibber from January 2007 warned that deleted revisions could theoretically be cleared without warning at any time, and a script exists to perform this function. However in practice they have only been cleared twice, both times due to technical issues – once on 3 December 2003, because the Wikipedia database was transferred to a new server, and once on 8 June 2004 due to a database crash.

[1] While there is no formal requirement that oversighters and checkusers also be administrators, the Arbitration Committee has traditionally restricted applications to those who are currently administrators.

[2] For more details, see this story in the Wikipedia Signpost.

[3] A message by Wikipedia system administrator Brion Vibber from January 2007 warned that deleted revisions could theoretically be cleared without warning at any time, and a script exists to perform this function. However in practice they have only been cleared twice, both times due to technical issues – once on 3 December 2003, because the Wikipedia database was transferred to a new server, and once on 8 June 2004 due to a database crash.

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