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