Rich Holton wrote:
I don't think it does anyone any good to minimize the real differences that exist. As an admin, I can view any deleted article any time I want with no permission, implicit or explicit, and no community review. This is a big deal to some non-admins, and there are presumed legal reasons for keeping this distinction. Just telling people to self-nominate for the current, restrictive RfA is not a viable solution to people who may have good reason to view those deleted articles. This is just one example.
One way in which I would have found this useful when I was more active in Wiktionary would have been to review the history of articles that were transwikied. Such a use would have been entirely passive in that it would involve no change to the Wikipedia database. Needing to be dragged into the usual battles over deletion, blocking, etc. would be too high a price for such a privilege.
Ec