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Wikipedia:Don't delete the main page

This page contains material which is considered humorous. It may also contain advice.
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Screenshot of the error messages received seen when logged out. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Permission error (Main Page). You do not have permission to delete this page, for the following reasons: 1) The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators. 2) You cannot delete or move the main page. [highlighted in red] 3) You cannot delete this page because it has been protected.
The new restriction put in place to prevent this from happening again, highlighted in red.

The Main Page has been deleted 16 times since it was created. Some deletions resulted from a mistake or misunderstanding, while others were caused by the involved administrators' accounts being compromised. Following these incidents, the page now enjoys a sui generis immunity to deletion in the software.[1][2] If someone, including admins, tries to delete it, they will receive the message: "You cannot delete or move the main page." This is not an excuse to try to delete the Main Page; the deletion might work!

Examples

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Just the fact that you can push the button doesn't mean you should.

One administrator was discussing the deletion of the main page in IRC and asked if the technical ability to delete pages with over 5,000 revisions, like the Main Page, had ever been re-enabled. Another administator jokingly commented that he had tested it and found that the main page still couldn't be deleted. The first admin thought he would test it for himself. The main page got deleted.[3] You might think you are having a laugh, but sometimes, the joke is missed. If you find yourself having to say "jokes do not come across well here", you are best off having avoided the joke in the first place. In other words, do not joke about causing disruption – someone may miss that it was meant in humor or sarcasm and act on it.

As honored in the village stocks, a different admin locked the servers for half an hour by deleting the Sandbox, necessitating the restriction of deletions for pages with over 5,000 edits. Hoping to bring it up to the 5000-edit level where it would not be deletable, an editor then used a bot to add 1,200 useless edits to the Main Page.

An example of an administrator's account being compromised is the deletion as of 05:08, December 8, 2007, which resulted in a desysopping. The account was apparently used by a relative after the admin failed to log off. Instead, the incident as of May 7, 2007 was the result of a password hack.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Fwd: Re: Deletion of large pages Tim Starling, WikiEN-l Mailing List, February 4, 2008.
  2. ^ The code that implements the protection
  3. ^ Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive363 § I deleted the Main Page. Retrieved 21 February 2010.
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