Nathan wrote:
Your suggestion might make sense if there were some
greater value to having
broad access to deleted content from Wikipedia. Other sites might find
something worth seeing among the morass of deleted articles, but a lot of
that "content" is poisonous, libelous, or simply and sometimes harmfully
wrong. Why would we need to make it easier for people to see that stuff? For
the instances where content of relative value is deleted? Those pages would
be sort of a needle in a gigantic pile of manure, wouldn't they, and so
wouldn't the negatives clearly outweigh the positives on this one?
It's unfortunate that so far we've no mechanism for distinguishing
between these different types of deletion. But clearly, a lot of
material that's of value to people has been deleted over the years; we
have regular controversies over that sort of thing (eg webcomics,
characters, episodes, etc.) and we wouldn't have them if people didn't
value the stuff that was getting wiped.
The reason I've contributed to Wikipedia over the years is because I
enjoy increasing the amount of information that's generally accessible
to the world. So yeah, anything that can save material like this is a
good thing, IMO. If someone wishes to wade through manure to find gems,
why stop them?