"allow non-sysops to view deleted pages".
You need to thin[k] about legal consequences if you allow everyone to
access
"deleted" copyright violations or illegal information.
I presume only logged in users would be allowed to view these articles, not everyone. I don't see how the legal consequences of this are any different from the legal consequences of allowing admins to access the articles, or allowing everyone to access the copyright violations in the history.
Yes, there should be some type of real deletion, for articles or history entries which are illegal for us to distribute, but this is a separate issue. It should be done regardless of whether access to deleted articles is limited to admins, to all logged in users, or to admins and me.
allow certain IP addresses to access deleted articles.
That's unfair to IP switchers, including but not limited to people who
access
WP from many computer networks (home/work/etc), people who change ISP and dynamic connections.
It's already "unfair" for these IP switchers, though. At least allowing some people to access these article would make it less unfair. I suppose this could be implemented with a username and password in addition, but I'd prefer to not have to log in, as this is just more overhead for my scripts.
[if] there's an objection to me personally having access to deleted
articles.
Not allowing access to information to a specific person just because that person's presence is perhaps undesired is undemocratic.
If I were singled out, perhaps, but I was using myself as an example. If Wikipedia allowed me, personally, to access deleted articles (in addition to admins), they certainly wouldn't be in any more legal trouble than if they only allowed admins.
I thought there was some due process that disallowed sysops from deleting legitimate content via "speedy deletions".
There is considerable disagreement over whether or not small stubs may be speedily deleted under this process. This is in addition to the fact that there are a number of admins who regularly break the speedy deletion policy.
I would say that downloading the dumps just to get some vfd articles
consumes
too much bandwidth that other people would use for reading and learning.
Well that's not the only reason I get the dumps, but yes, it's not the most efficient method.
I think MediaWiki keeps all deleted articles in the archive database table
but
it is readable only by sysops. Perhaps you could ask for sysop privileges
and
use them only for reading the deleted articles
I've actually already tried this. My request was overwhelmingly disapproved.