It depends on the wiki. Suppose, for instance, you're a RationalWiki user editing Conservapedia, and then the Conservapedia sysops decide, "Hey wait, this user is a troll, so let's block him and delete all this work." If he asks for copies of his articles, they might say, "We don't want to help you spread that nonsense any further."
There also have been wikis whose databases got corrupted, and then they found out that their backups weren't usable either.
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 12:52 AM, Martin Urbanec <martin.urbanec@wikimedia.cz
wrote:
Mediawiki archives all revisions even they are deleted by a sysop. There is no way to delete revs permanently by default (without an extra extension) and there is no need for it too.
Sysops can view all deleted revisions. But when problem with wiki's HDD is still a problem.
Then backup, backup, backup is a solution.
Yeah, this is from the administrator's point of view, not the user's one. But I can't see any reason why such extension would be useful still.
As a sysop of cs.wiki I personally have no problem with sending the content or restoring it when there is some reason for it. Yeah, you may say not everybody know that the content could be restored technically. But those who know they may use such extension would know the content can be restored too.
So instead of thinking about the extension itself I would rather talk about the need for it.
Best, Martin