Once upon a time, pages could not be deleted by anyone but Jimbo and Larry

Once upon a time, every user had a voice for or against deletion, not only respected old hands (with at least xx days of presence, and at least nn number of major edits)

Once upon a time, a "regular" user could ask for the undeletion of an article and see his request respectfully and generously temporarily acknowledged

Once upon a time, it was also possible for a sysop to undelete articles upon someone asking to see the content, this without being repeatedly outed

Once upon a time, things were decided per consensus, not per democracy 50% + 1 voice (undeletion rule)

Once upon a time, there were not so many rules that makes en looks like a french administration

Once upon a time, users did not need to be sysops to dare weeding wikipedia

Once upon a time, users dared weed wikipedia without fear of being said all the time their weeding does not follow the rules

Once upon a time, a rule was not so much carved in stone that it could not be challenged

Once upon a time, it was easier :-)

 

>So is, imho, the renewed assault on the sep. 11 pages, but I guess
>that's to be expected, since the argument "some people put so much work
>into carefully researching the reports on the lives of the people killed
>that day and creating entries for them, and we can't be bothered to do
>the same for other people who have been killed, so we should delete all
>the entries" will never die.