This is an excellent idea IMO. A friend of mine had one of his articles deleted and he didn't know what for. He just thought it was a technical problem and never came back.
Christiaan
On 8 Aug 2004, at 2:15 pm, Timwi wrote:
One idea I was toying with in my mind recently is this. When sysops delete an article, the article goes back to saying "Wikipedia does not have an article with this title yet." Maybe we should actually let everyone (including anonymous users) know that there used to be an article, and (this is the important part) show the reason for its deletion.
If a newbie goes back to see what happened to their article, and they see it gone, they are more likely to just put it back in (it looks to them more like a glitch in the system or an accident than a deliberate deleting). If it actually said "This article was deleted for the following reason: vandalism", they are more likely to ackowledge that putting their article back in is going to have the same effect again.