... Because not everyone here reads the village pump:
There is a current proposal on meta to grant commons admins the
ability to view deleted image/image talk pages on all projects,
including English Wikipedia.
(
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub#Global_deleted_image_review)
This proposal is important because there are hundreds of thousands of
images on commons which began their Wiki-life on other projects and
were later transferred to commons with incomplete or inaccurate
history information and were then deleted. There are also instances
of images on commons being falsely claimed as sourced from another
wiki. Without the ability to completely review these images they may
be handled incorrectly. Today commons admins are forced to
coordinate with other projects via IRC, email, etc, to evaluate these
cases ... most of whom turn out just fine. This converts a couple of
seconds clicking into minutes of nagging and conversation. In practice
most commons admins just don't bother with it and the images remain
unchecked.
The initial proposal achieved aggressive and universal support from
commons admins. The consensus is that we need this permission in order
to serve the projects. It was initially proposed that we grant the
ability to view all deleted pages, but discussion with users from
other projects resulted in a limiting of scope to just
image/image_talk.
Your input is requested at the poll. It wouldn't be right to push
through a wide impacting proposal on meta without input from the
projects at large.
Thanks.