We are reconsidering our strategy for archiving outdated pages on ArchWiki [1], see [2] for the full discussion if interested. Currently, we don't do any archiving, we simply delete obsolete pages (after being flagged with 'Template:Out of date' or 'Template:Deletion' for some time of course).
I would like to ask a question regarding one of the suggestions, which is to make Special:Undelete [3] available for everybody (by assigning 'deletedhistory', 'deletedtext' and 'browsearchive' rights to all groups). This is the most simple, but also most controversial way to solve our problem. The main question is regarding security, because obviously this feature is intended for administrators only.
The only bad implication we could think of is if somebody creates a defamatory page and we delete it, we wouldn't be able to prevent anyone from linking to the deleted revision(s) and thus exposing the wiki to possible legal consequences. However, the same attack could be carried out on an already existing useful article, and the same fix could be used in both cases, i.e. using the RevisionDelete [4] feature.
We would also appreciate any other comments on why this is a good/bad idea, suggestions of another archiving solution etc.
Regards, Lahwaacz (ArchWiki admin)
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_page [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Requests#Should_we_remove_or_a... [3]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Undelete [4]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:RevisionDelete