Articles that are outside the scope of a collective, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the collective's Admins and Recognized Members or the site moderators.
See the Article guidelines for more guidance on our expectations for articles.
Users can typically delete their own articles (or any article they have been specifically added as an editor for). To do so, the author can click the "Edit article" button at the top of the article page, then click the "Delete" button that appears at the top of the editing page. Admins and Recognized Members of a collective can delete any of the collective's articles in the same way.
Articles can also be deleted by the community. The site moderators can delete any article using the "Delete" button at the bottom of the page. Additionally, any article that accumulates enough rude or abusive or spam flags will be automatically deleted.
What happens when an article is deleted?
Once an article has been deleted, it will disappear for all users except staff, the site moderators, the Admins of the collective, and users with at least 10,000 reputation. Deleted articles are always visible to their authors, regardless of the author's reputation.
Deleted articles can be viewed and edited by their original authors. Authors can edit their deleted articles, and then use the flag process to request undeletion by moderators. Alternatively, authors can use the updated article content in a new article proposal, which will then go through the article review process.
Note that deleted articles do not normally appear in search results. However, site moderators can use the search operators is:article deleted:1 to find deleted articles by any user on the site.
If your question or answer was deleted, please see the Help Center pages for deleted questions or deleted answers instead. For more details about how post deletion works, see this community-curated FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange.