What concerns me is that we might find some FA
candidates in there.
Can we think of an algorithm? DGG
You could narrow it down by looking at all deleted articles over a
certain size which don't have "copyvio" or "copyright" in the
deletion
reason. You should be able to narrow it down a fair bit that way - you
then have to plough through the articles manually. A deleted article
that might be almost an FAC is quite likely not formatted correctly
yet, so you won't be able to automatically search for links and refs
etc.