Shifti:Deletion
On occasion it may prove necessary to remove material from Shifti. There isn't a formalized process for determining what to remove, as there often is on larger wikis, but there are some general guidelines one might find informative.
Deletion mechanisms
There are two methods of removing material from Shifti; blanking it as part of a routine edit, or deleting it from the database. Any user capable of editing a page is capable of blanking material in it as part of his or her edit, but only administrators are able to delete pages completely.
When an editor blanks some or all of a page without deleting the page, the removed material is still accessible via that page's "history" link. The edit history retains all previous versions of the page, so if something gets removed by this method any reader can still find it again with a little poking around and any editor can restore it.
Full deletion is different, in that the page "ceases to exist" as far as routine editor access is concerned. Links to the deleted page will appear red, as if the page had never been created in the first place, and there will be no visible version history. The deleted material can still be restored by an administrator later if need be, but you'll have to specifically request it.
Deletion reasons
Any author may remove his own stories whenever he likes, either by blanking them (a useful temporary measure) or by requesting that they be deleted. Blanking material on other pages should be done with more caution.
Administrative deletions may be done as part of routine housekeeping, for example to get rid of a mis-titled category page. Deletion doesn't actually save any disk space since deleted revisions are retained in a private database in case they need to be restored, so generally speaking "housekeeping" deletions should err on the side of caution; administrators should ask a page's creator whether a seemingly unused or useless page is really no longer wanted by them.
Material that obviously violates Shifti's policies or legal requirements may be deleted more promptly. For example, posting someone else's stories without explicit permission is a violation of copyright, and in this case administrators may err in the other direction and delete material without asking first. If a mistake is made, please don't get upset; deletions can be undone, just explain the situation and it can be worked out.
In accordance with Shifti's copyright policy, an author can request that a story of theirs be deleted by the administrators. To contact an administrator, see Shifti:Administrators.