Wikipedia:Attack page
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This page documents an official English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that should normally be followed by all editors. Any edit to it should reflect consensus. Consider discussing potential changes on the talk page first. |
An attack page is a Wikipedia article, page, template, category, redirect or image that exists primarily to disparage its subject. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, these pages are subject to being deleted by any administrator at any time. Non-administrative users who find such pages should add the {{db-attack}} tag to them, and should warn the user who created them by putting the {{attack|page}} tag on their talk page.
If the subject of the article is notable, but the existing page consists primarily of personal attacks against that subject and there's no good revision to revert to, then the attack page should be deleted and an appropriate stub article should be written in its place. This is especially important if the page contains biographical material about a living person.
Attack pages eligible for speedy deletion may be inside or outside the main namespace. However, this policy is not usually meant to apply to requests for comment, requests for mediation and similar processes (although these processes have their own guidelines for deletion of requests that are invalid or in bad faith). On the other hand, keeping a 'list of enemies' or 'list of everything bad user:XXX did" on your user space is neither constructive nor appropriate. Bear in mind that the key to resolving a dispute is not to find and list all the dirt you can find on somebody.
[edit] Note to administrators
When deleting attack pages, it is important that you don't quote any of the content in your deletion summary. In some cases, MediaWiki will offer a prefilled deletion summary that includes some of the content being deleted; make sure you replace the summary with something more appropriate (such as "[[WP:CSD#G10]] - Attack page") before clicking the delete button. Once added to the log, there is currently no way to delete a deletion summary short of direct Oversight intervention.
