Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-452-20150123132337/@comment-4189499-20150123141047

I think it depends on the circumstances. Maybe the admin is doing a mass deletion to clear vandalism, or maybe they're doing a reorganisation of pages which requires them all to be recreated in a different way, or maybe the pages being mass deleted were all stubs and their content is going to be merged with larger related pages. On an answers wiki, it is quite normal for an admin to delete hundreds of badly worded questions (or questions which violate policy for other reasons) at a time. Those are all valid reasons for mass deletion. That is why immediate banning should never be performed for mass deletions as there may be a legitimate motive behind the act. However, if it's a total clear-out of the wiki, it is highly unlikely to be legitimate, or at least not on a well-established wiki. Again, if freshly adopting a rather dead wiki, an admin may have to clear out most if not all original pages due to them not conforming to a standard needed going forward or a format the new admin wants to display the wiki in. There is always a need to assume good faith in any editing situation, and so I say A to question 2 and B to question 3. However, in regards to Question 1, an admin shouldn't clear out every page on a wiki without discussing it with the community first, or at least be seen to make an effort to contact other regular users of the wiki. An admin doesn't own a wiki, the community does. If there is no community because the wiki is in effect dead, then the admin is the only community member and can in effect do what they like, but only in the cases of otherwise unoccupied wikis. If an admin mass deletes against community will, then they are a vandal and will need to have their rights removed. But until it can be proved that the admin was not acting in good faith, good faith should always be assumed.