Nathan wrote:
If there was a way to mark deleted content as "harmless" or "accurate but not appropriate for inclusion" then I think that allowing wider access to that material would be fine. I think there would be a fairly small number of "resurrections" where content was returned to the encyclopedia without objection, but if people wanted to look it up and make it available in some other way I wouldn't have a problem with that. The difficulty is that you can't compartmentalize it, you have to allow people access to the crap along with everything else. When the crap is harmful or patently offensive, broader access isn't something you want.
Yeah, either way there needs to be some sort of human editorial judgement to separate wheat from dross. But very few of the things that get deleted from Wikipedia are likely to put anyone at risk for real legal trouble, so a lot of people seem willing to shoulder the necessary work.
It'd be nice to see some mechanism of differentiating types of deletion right within Wikipedia; a suggestion I've seen before and that I like is a namespace or similar where "non-notable" and other such stuff can be sent, reserving full-blown deletion for stuff like libel and copyright violation. Or even just some method of standardized flagging that could help scavenger sites like wikiunderground sort stuff more easily.