How to Tell if a Wikipedia Page Has Been Deleted Before

To check whether a Wikipedia page has been deleted, go to Special:Log/delete, type the exact page title into the Target field, and press Search. If the page was deleted after December 23, 2004, a timestamped log entry shows who deleted it, when, and why — including a code such as A7 or G11, or a link to a community deletion discussion.

A missing Wikipedia page is not the same as a page that was never attempted. That distinction matters before you invest in creating or recreating an article. Most of the research is public. This guide walks through the full check in order of ease and reliability.

Why deletion history matters before you create or recreate a Wikipedia page

A prior deletion is not a dead end — it is a data point telling you what Wikipedia’s community or administrators already decided about the subject. Reading it correctly changes how, or whether, you proceed. Through the Articles for Deletion process, almost 500,000 articles were deleted between 2001 and 2021, and as of 2021 roughly 60% of nominated articles ended in deletion (Wikipedia, Deletion of articles on Wikipedia). Deletion is common; its record is durable. For a fuller picture of how Wikipedia’s deletion machinery works — from speedy criteria through community votes — Wikipedia’s article deletion policies explain the full framework.

A prior deletion changes your strategy in three concrete ways.

• G4 speedy re-deletion risk. A new article substantially identical to one deleted through a community discussion can be removed by a single administrator — no new debate required — under criterion G4.
• Salting. “If a particular page has been recreated and deleted multiple times, administrators may decide to protect it against recreation (‘salting’) so that it stays deleted,” per Wikipedia’s guidance on why a page was deleted. Attempting to create a salted title shows a protection notice instead of an edit box.
• Notability precedent. A lost AfD means the community formally decided the subject does not meet the general notability guideline. Recreation needs genuinely new, substantial independent coverage — not the same sources repackaged.

What can you actually see in the deletion record?

Access to deletion information falls into three tiers. Knowing which tier you are in prevents wasted effort.

Non-admins cannot read deleted text by design: “Only administrators, checkusers, and oversighters can view the content of deleted pages,” because deleted material may contain copyright violations, personal information, or libel (Wikipedia, Viewing and restoring deleted pages). The text is archived internally — it is simply inaccessible to the public.

How to check if a Wikipedia page was deleted: the 60-second log check

Start here every time. The deletion log is a full record of when, why, and by whom each page was deleted. It also records undeletions and the number of restored revisions (Wikipedia, Viewing and restoring deleted pages).

Using Special:Log/delete

1. Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete, or use Special:Log?page=PAGE_TITLE to see every log type for a title at once.
2. Enter the exact page title in the Target field. Wikipedia titles are case-sensitive except for the first letter, so capitalization, spelling, and spacing must match beyond that first character (Wikipedia, Contact us — deleted page).
3. Press Search. If the page was deleted after December 23, 2004 — the date of the MediaWiki 1.4 upgrade — the entry appears. Older deletions are in the Wikipedia deletion log archives.
4. The log shows the 50 most recent entries by default. If a title was deleted and recreated multiple times, scroll or expand to see the full sequence.
5. Read the deletion summary — it carries the code or reason (see the decoder below).
6. If the summary contains an AfD link, click through to read the full community discussion.

There is also a fast visual tell: clicking a red link for a title that once existed shows a notice — a bullet with a timestamp and an editor’s username confirming the deletion. That bullet is your entry point into the log.

How to read the Wikipedia deletion reason codes

The summary field is your diagnosis. “Very brief summaries such as ‘A7’ or ‘CSD A7’, as well as things like ‘spam’ and {{db-bio}}, usually refer to speedy deletion,” per Wikipedia. Speedy deletion is one administrator acting with no discussion. The codes that matter most for people and companies are below.

The single most useful distinction: a G11 speedy means “fix the tone and try again,” because promotional writing gets pages deleted even when the subject is notable. A lost AfD on notability means the community formally decided the subject is not notable — and recreation without new, substantial coverage will hit G4. AfD discussions are never themselves deleted; they remain as permanent archived pages at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PAGE_TITLE (Wikipedia, Articles for deletion). The AfD process and what happens inside those community discussions is worth understanding before you try to contest or work around a prior community decision.

Was the Wikipedia page ever live, or did it die as a draft?

Many attempts never became live articles. They were submitted through Articles for Creation and declined, or abandoned in a userspace sandbox. These do not appear in the deletion log until the draft itself is deleted — so a clean deletion-log result does not always mean a clean slate.

1. Go directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:PAGE_TITLE. If a draft exists, check its History tab and its Talk page for AfC decline templates, which record each rejection and its reason.
2. Search the Draft namespace only (ns 118): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=SUBJECT&ns118=1.
3. Look for G13 entries in the deletion log. G13 means a draft sat abandoned for six months before deletion — a strong signal that someone tried and gave up.
4. Check Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PAGE_TITLE for any discussion tied to the subject.

How to see what a deleted Wikipedia page actually said

Non-admins cannot read deleted Wikipedia text — but mirrors and web archives often preserve a copy. This is where you learn not just that a page was rejected, but what it said and why editors objected. Work through these tools in priority order.

EverybodyWiki

EverybodyWiki is an inclusionist encyclopedia, founded in December 2017 in France, that runs bots importing pages Wikipedia marks for deletion — effectively a soft landing for rejected content. At one point it had imported roughly 45,000 English Wikipedia biographies (EverybodyWiki FAQ; Wikidata Q108492292). Check a subject at https://en.everybodywiki.com/PAGE_TITLE.

Wayback Machine

If the article was ever live, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine may hold a pre-deletion snapshot. Search https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAGE_TITLE and look for captures dated before the deletion. Pages deleted within hours of creation are often never crawled, so the fastest speedy deletions typically leave no Wayback trace.

Other mirror sources

A site search — site:en.wikipedia.org "Subject Name" on Google or Bing — surfaces Talk pages, AfD archives, and sandbox drafts the deletion log does not index directly. Third-party Wikipedia mirrors may still host old article text. Deletionpedia historically preserved deleted articles with a header noting the deletion type and discussion; as of its last active period it had amassed 91,250 content pages, but the site appears to have stopped functioning around February 2023 and should not be relied on as a live resource (Wikipedia, Deletionpedia).

Read this before you reuse anything. Mirror content is a record of what Wikipedia rejected — not proof that the subject is now notable. Copying or closely paraphrasing a deleted article into a new submission is the fastest way to trigger G4 (recreation of deleted content) or G11 (promotional tone). Use mirrors to understand why the page failed, not as a template to repost.

Is the title locked? How to check whether a Wikipedia page is salted

Salting is create-protection applied to a title that has been recreated and deleted repeatedly, locking it so that only administrators — and sometimes autoconfirmed users — can create at that title. To check, open Special:Log/protect and enter the page title. The everyday symptom: “if you try to edit a protected title, a message box will inform you about it” (Wikipedia) — a protection notice appears where the edit box should be.

Protection is case-sensitive in ways that trip people up: a salted page may not block on all spelling variants, and admins routinely catch obvious variants but not every one. That is not an invitation to game the title. Creating an article at a near-identical workaround title is a fast route to having that title salted too — and it signals exactly the evasive behavior that prompted protection in the first place. The legitimate path is a Deletion Review or a direct admin request, ideally with a strong draft already prepared that resolves the original objection. Understanding the broader landscape of Wikipedia page protection and how to work within it is useful context before taking that step.

Cross-checks and advanced tools for tracing Wikipedia deletion history

If the deletion log and mirrors do not give you the full picture, four further tools go deeper.

• Wikidata sitelinks. Open the Wikidata item — for our example, Q16832227 — and read the Wikipedia sitelink box. No English sitelink means no current live English Wikipedia article, though it says nothing about deletion history. Other-language sitelinks may point to articles that exist in other Wikipedia editions.
• XTools. The XTools suite offers Pages Created and article-history tooling, useful for tracing who created or recreated a title and whether one username is behind multiple deletion-prone submissions.
• MediaWiki API deletedrevisions module. Non-admins can retrieve limited metadata for deleted revisions — timestamps and byte sizes — but not the content itself. It confirms a deletion happened and gives a sense of the page’s size at deletion (MediaWiki, Deletion and undeletion).
• Talk page and Deletion Review archives. If a deleted article’s Talk page survived, it can document prior editorial disputes. WP:DRV archives record any formal challenge to a deletion — invaluable context on how contested the removal was.

What to do next based on why the Wikipedia page was deleted

The deletion reason is a diagnosis; match the code to the right next step rather than reflexively resubmitting.

One process rule governs all of these: contact the administrator who performed the deletion before filing a Deletion Review. Wikipedia’s guidance is explicit — discuss it with the deleting admin first, and use Deletion Review only for a genuine procedural error, not simply because you disagree with the outcome (Wikipedia, Why was the page I created deleted?). Going straight to DRV without that conversation reads as combative and usually stalls.

In practice, the diagnosis often changes the recommendation entirely. A G11 finding points toward a tone-first rewrite that preserves the existing sourcing. A lost AfD on notability points toward the harder answer: “not yet — build the coverage first.” No amount of rewriting substitutes for independent secondary sources that do not yet exist. Reading the log correctly is what separates those two very different roads. If you are weighing whether the subject clears the bar at all, the Wikipedia eligibility and notability guide is the right place to stress-test that question before touching a draft.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Special:Log/delete (deletion log)
• Wikipedia — Viewing and restoring deleted pages
• Wikipedia — Why was the page I created deleted?
• Wikipedia — Contact us (deleted page)
• Wikipedia — Criteria for speedy deletion
• Wikipedia — Articles for deletion
• Wikipedia — Deletion policy
• Wikipedia — Deletion of articles on Wikipedia
• Wikipedia — Articles for creation
• Wikipedia — Protection policy
• Wikipedia — Notability
• Wikipedia — Deletionpedia
• EverybodyWiki — FAQ
• Wikidata — EverybodyWiki (Q108492292)
• Internet Archive — Wayback Machine
• XTools
• MediaWiki — Help: Deletion and undeletion