Wikipedia:ROUGHCONSENSUS

Even admins should mostly use the , , and pages when they think a page should be deleted. There are a few limited exceptions, which are given at . Every admin should also read and understand .

Once the decision to delete (or not) has been made, please document the decision using the procedures at .

Administrators must use their best judgment, attempting to be as impartial as is possible for a fallible human, to determine when rough consensus has been reached. For example, administrators can disregard opinions and comments if they feel that there is strong evidence that they were not made in good faith. Such "bad faith" opinions include those being made by sock puppets, or accounts created solely for voting on the deletion discussion. If a rough consensus holds that the nomination was made in bad faith, the page may be speedily kept.

If the major stakeholders have not been notified of the proposed deletion or given time to respond, reliable consensus determinations will rarely be possible.

Consensus is not determined by counting heads, but by looking at strength of argument, and underlying policy (if any). Arguments that contradict policy, are based on opinion rather than fact, or are logically fallacious, are frequently discounted. For instance, if it the entire page is found to be a copyright violation, a page is always deleted. If an argument for deletion is that the page lacks sources, but an editor adds the missing references, said argument is no longer relevant.

Per "ignore all rules", a local consensus can suspend a guideline in a particular case where suspension is in the encyclopedia's best interests, but this should be no more common in deletion than in any other area.

The possibility of harm to living subjects must be considered when exercising editorial judgment.

With regards to living people, a closing admin must take into account the policy on Biographies of living persons along with our deletion policy for biographies. When closing an AfD about a living person whose notability is ambiguous, the closing administrator should take into account whether the subject of the article being deleted has asked that it be deleted. The degree of weight given to such a request is left to the admin's discretion.

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