These criteria apply to all namespaces, and are in addition to namespace-specific criteria in following sections.
- Patent nonsense and gibberish, an unsalvageably incoherent page with no meaningful content. This does not include: poor writing, partisan screeds, obscene remarks, vandalism, fictional material, material not in English, poorly translated material, implausible theories, or hoaxes; some of these, however, may be deleted as vandalism in blatant cases.
- Test pages. Testing is permitted in the sandbox and in users' own user space.
- Pure vandalism. This includes blatant and obvious misinformation, and redirects created by cleanup from page-move vandalism.
- Recreation of deleted material. A copy, by any title, of a page deleted via a deletion discussion, provided the copy is substantially identical to the deleted version and that any changes in the recreated page do not address the reasons for which the material was deleted. This does not apply to content that has been undeleted via deletion review, deleted via proposed deletion, or to speedy deletions (although in that case, the previous speedy criterion, or other speedy criteria, may apply). Also, content moved to user space for explicit improvement is excluded, although material moved or copied to circumvent Wikipedia's deletion policy is not.
- Banned user. Pages created by banned users in violation of their ban, with no substantial edits by others.
- Technical deletions. Non-controversial maintenance, such as temporarily deleting a page to merge page histories, or performing uncontroversial page moves.
- Author requests deletion, if requested in good faith, and provided the page's only substantial content was added by its author. (For redirects created as a result of a pagemove, the mover must also have been the only substantive contributor to the page prior to the move.) If the author blanks the page, this can be taken as a deletion request.
- Talk pages whose corresponding article does not exist. This excludes any talk page which is useful to the project, and in particular: deletion discussions that are not logged elsewhere, user talk pages, talk pages for images on Wikimedia Commons, and talk subpages (such as archives) whose corresponding "top-level" page exists. This includes talk pages of pages which were deleted since the creation of the talk page.
- Office actions. The Wikimedia Foundation office reserves the right to speedily delete a page temporarily in cases of exceptional circumstances. Deletions of this type should not be reversed without permission from the Foundation.
- Pages that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Q. Doe is an imbecile"). These are sometimes called "attack pages". This includes a biography of a living person that is entirely negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no neutral version in the history to revert to. Administrators deleting such pages should not quote the content of the page in the deletion summary, and if the page is an article about a living person it should not be restored or recreated by any editor until it meets biographical article standards.
- Blatant advertising. Pages which exclusively promote some entity and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic. Note that simply having a company or product as its subject does not qualify an article for this criterion.
- Blatant copyright infringement. Text pages that meet all of the following (for images and media, see I9):
- The material was copied from another website or other source (but consider the possibility that the other copy was obtained from Wikipedia—see Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks);
- There is no non-infringing content on either the page itself, or in the history, worth saving;
- The material was introduced at once by a single person; and
- There is no credible assertion of public domain, fair use, or a free license (see also List of countries' copyright length as a guide).
Notify the page's creator when tagging a page for deletion under this criterion; the template {{nothanks-sd}} is available for this. After deleting, administrators should recreate the page from earlier noninfringing page content if available. If multiple deletion criteria apply, list them all on the deletion summary. If notified of a plausible error, the deleting administrator should restore the content and, if a confirmation e-mail has not been received, follow the Wikipedia:Copyright problems procedure, replacing the article with the {{copyvio}} template. Some suspected copyright infringements are listed at Wikipedia:Suspected copyright violations.
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