2008/9/6 WJhonson@aol.com:
I doubt that deleted stuff is libelous. Libelous material is oversighted, not AfD'd which is what the mentioned site is archiving.
Oh, goodness, no.
Oversighted material is quite bad; not all quite bad material is oversighted. A fair proportion of CSD is gutter abuse of the "might be libellous if it wasn't so stupid" form (kids explaining how their favourite teacher has a great liking for his pet dog, etc) and no-one bothers oversighting that; just delete and it's gone.
AFDs, likewise; if there's sensitive personal information, that might get oversighted; if it's a libellous hatchet job that's going to get deleted anyway, well, it'll just get deleted.
It would solve this disccusion rather neatly if all "bad deletions" were oversighted - indeed, the proposal here is basically for something conceptually like that to happen, with some way of differentially deleting "good but not for here" and "actively bad" - but it's certainly not the way it currently happens.