Help:Deleting pages with a colon in front of their name

Pages may appear in categories or other places with a colon in front of their name. This happens when they used to be in a namespace that was later removed. There are two ways to get rid of these pages: adding the namespace back and deleting them normally, or finding their page ID and using the MediaWiki API to delete them.

It is possible to find the IDs of all the pages in a category with the MediaWiki API. For Category:Players, for example, this could be done with. The page IDs can be found in the output shown on that API page.

Once the page ID is known, the page can be deleted by sending a POST request to, where   is the page ID,   is the deletion reason and   is the edit token, which can be obtained with.