Bryan Derksen said:
If we were to follow both the policy that if something is deleted via a VfD then a new article about it should never be created, and also the policy that VfD is a quality-control mechanism (as you suggest in your other posting sent around the same time as this one), this would lead to some articles being declared forever uncreatable simply because the first attempt to make it was unmitigatedly bad even if there's a legitimate interest in having an article on that subject. Since deletion removes old versions from history entirely I don't see what the point would be, they're gone either way.
A capital concussion of the nail has been detected.
In this specific case the old deleted Wollmann article was already pretty good IMO. I think the issue is whether the VfD came to the wrong conclusion about it in the first place.
It was a case of a new editor (me, at the time) ameliorating a poor article that had been posted for malicious purposes (so they could claim that Wikipedia, a respected encyclopedia, was against their enemy). Yes, it's well written. No, Wollmann is not a public person (unless we undelete the article and make him one). The public/private distinction is in any case much less relevant outside the USA.