As our site has grown and evolved with its authors, we have decided that we want a certain level of quality curated by our community. Therefore, pages that are deemed to have an unsatisfactory level of quality are removed from the wiki. However, there are other cases where a page may be deleted.
Articles can get deleted due to four primary reasons:
- 1.) Author request. The author of an article may, for any reason and at any time, desire to delete one of their written articles.
- 2.) Coldposting. Pages that have not gone through our posting policy or received a greenlight will be immediately deleted by staff for failing to follow the process of quality control. This process will be summarized later in this guide, but is detailed in this page.
- 3.) Deletion threshold. Articles require to stay above a certain threshold of community acceptance to remain on the site. This threshold is expressed as a rating of +10 for tales and +15 for non-tale pages. Pages in the positives that do not have downvotes will not be deleted.
- 4.) Staff decision. Staff reserves the right to delete articles that break the rules of the site in other ways.
Staff will not delete an article because of personal preference or bias.
The process behind the first three possibilities will be elaborated upon in this guide. Consult the table of contents below to skip ahead.
If you feel your article has been deleted unfairly, be it that you have correctly followed the greenlight process, or that your article was above the deletion threshold at the time of deletion, or any other reason, please reach out to staff.
AUTHOR REQUEST
You, as an author, have the inalienable right to delete your content from the site whenever you want, provided you are the sole author of such content. With content that was made with other authors, the majority of authors must all agree to remove their works from the wiki.
Once you have made a request to staff, staff will delete the pages for you. Non-staff cannot delete their own works. Send a Wikidot or Discord message to any staff member and they will process your request. Please allow for a few days for staff to process your request.
Official pages, guides, and articles created by other users, or in collaboration by other users cannot be deleted like this except with staff approval.
COLDPOSTING
In order to post an article of any kind to the site, you will need to go through a process of quality control. This process involves getting three pieces of critique from 3 different users, each being at least 500 characters (roughly 100 words).
Or you can reach out to a greenlighter, ask them to read your article, and get their approval (greenlight) to post.
This is to ensure a universal bare minimum of quality and make it easier to filter out unacceptably poorly written pages, such as those that feature abundant and blatant grammatical errors, or feature extreme misconceptions regarding the nature of the site and its content. Read more about our posting process here.
Should your article be deleted this way, you will be informed about it via your Wikidot account, and the text of your article will be preserved. Consult the "MESSAGING AND LOGGING" section for more specifics.
Note that for certain contests this rule may be voided: make sure to consult the rules of the contest before posting. Even in these exceptions, getting critique is strongly recommended.
DELETION THRESHOLD
IMPORTANT NOTE: The deletion threshold has been raised to +10 for tale pages and +15 for non-tale pages. Pages that were posted before May 31, 2024 will not be deleted due to the new threshold.
The Backrooms Wiki has an up/downvote system of rating articles. This is the primary means by which content is accepted or rejected from the site, and thus is a way in which articles may be deleted.
The deletion or downvote threshold of the site is a rating of +10 for tale pages and +15 for non-tale pages. This does not mean that any article receiving a downvote will be deleted: this will happen if the total sum of up and downvotes on any given article is not above a total rating of +10 or +15.
For example, if your article has 6 downvotes and 21 upvotes, the total rating will be displayed as +15, and thus will be safe from deletion. If your article has 6 downvotes and 15 upvotes, the total rating will be +9, and thus will undergo the process of deletion.
In line with our new threshold raise, pages that do not receive any downvotes will not be deleted.
Additionally, all pages are subject to a grace period. When new articles are posted for the first time1, they have a grace period of 4 days from the time of posting, which means they will not be deleted should they hit deletion threshold during that time.
When an article stays below the thresholds, the article will then enter a deletion range check, in which it will have 24 hours to go above that rating before it is deleted and receive an 'in-deletion' tag on the article. If the vote goes up during those 24 hours, then the tag will be removed, but if it retains the negative rating, the page will be deleted.
In the time between the start of the counter and the final deletion of the article, any user may request the right to rewrite it from staff or the original author(s). Articles undergoing a rewrite will be tagged "in-rewrite" and are exempt from deletion by downvote threshold. You can read more about our rewrite policy here.
Once the counter reaches 0, if there are no requests to rewrite, it will be deleted by staff and logged appropriately (see MESSAGING AND LOGGING section).
Articles that have received a greenlight or critique can still be deleted if they reach the downvote threshold. Greenlighters can approve of your article and consider up to site standards, but community members may still decide it unfit for the site and downvote it.
It is generally good manners to explain the reasons behind a downvote in the forum section of an article. Understanding why a page was downvoted can help the author improve for the next draft. However, this is not a requirement or obligation.
You may reach out to individual users if you would like to know the motives for their downvote, but they are not required to answer or give any explanation. If they do not respond or request that you cease engaging with them, you have to do so.
Downvotes can occur for any number of reasons: misuse of the setting, poor syntax or structure, etc…, but personal bias cannot be one of them. If you think someone is downvoting you for any reason but the contents of your article, please reach out to staff.
If your page is deleted, you are always free to rewrite your article and try again! You can ask for more feedback, ask different people, give yourself some time to think and regroup, etc. — Rome wasn't made in a day, and lots of really successful articles started out with the wrong foot. Don't give up if things didn't go as planned!
MESSAGING AND LOGGING
If your article is deleted for any reason but your own choice, you will be informed via Wikidot private message and the deletion logged in the deletions thread of Backrooms Oversight, the administrative site.
Private messages communicating the deletion of your article will look like this if it was deleted due to coldposting…
… and like this if it was deleted due to reaching the downvote threshold.
Together with these messages you will always receive a copy of the source code of your article.
Additionally, deletion logs look like this:
They will list the original URL, the reason for deletion, the date of the deletion, your Wikidot username, and have a collapsible containing a copy of the source code of your article.
