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.