The deletion archives were first created on 10 August 2002. The first post to Wikipedia:Deletion review, which was then known as "Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion", was on 14 May 2003. Seven months later on 3 December 2003, the archive was cleared because the Wikipedia database was transfered to a new server. Pages deleted prior to the database crash on 8 June 2004 are not present in the current archive because the archive tables were not backed up. This means pages cannot be restored by a sysop.

Deletions prior to December 2006 are listed by closing date. Decisions starting December 2006 are listed by nomination date. Monthly archives are very large and might take a long time to load. For a list of Deletion review subpages, see All pages (Wikipedia namespace).