Andrew Gray wrote:
Think of it as a library. We're not burning all these tedious administrative documents, nor are we declaring them classified; we're just taking them off the public shelves and putting them in the storage room in the basement. If people want one, they can ask at the desk.
The notion of using deletion as a way to "store" stuff long-term gives me the heebie-jeebies. The name and intent of the process is completely wrong, for starters. Deletion is supposed to prevent people from accessing stuff, but we want everyone to be able to see these historical AfDs when they want to so you're proposing adding a kludgy intermediary layer to have admins manually undeleting and redeleting this particular type of article on request. This will be a burden on both the people wanting to view the AfDs and on the admins, who already have plenty of demands on their time.
And historically, deleted articles have been permanently purged before - IIRC the last time was somewhere in 2002. How do we know it won't happen again? We know that old versions of existing articles aren't going to be purged because the GFDL probably makes that illegal, but there's nothing stopping deleted material from going away forever at some point in the future.
There isn't anything *wrong* with these administrative documents, sure. But they clutter up the shelves, and people keep finding them in keyword searches in the catalogue and getting all overexcited (because there really isn't anything interesting in 99% of them), and we're never *completely* sure that people aren't wandering into the stacks and cutting pages out or adding new ones in - they're all loose-leaf - so they can go back and quote them later.
We should our cataloging and searching methods, then. Deleting them just to keep them out of sight is analogous to piling them in a dumpster out back along with all the other trash and hoping the garbage men never come, not putting them in a storeroom. Who collects their trash in a storeroom?