I think the best solution would be to allow regular logged-in users to view deleted pages. Of course only admins should be able to delete and undelete, but I don't really see any good reason why the contents of deleted pages should be not viewable by regular

users. >Of course, deleted pages should stay invisible to >anons, so e.g. spiders don't index deleted stuff.

Cheers!

• Nohat (David Friedland)

P.S. If there is a very good reason regular users aren't allowed to view deleted pages, I'd like to

know >what it is. There may be one; I just can't think of >any.

I strongly advocated that position of you some months ago (you may find most of it in the ml archives, and in http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletion_management_redesign

At that time, there was no [[pages for undeletion]] (so no official process for undeletion), and undeletion was very painful to do, so very few people took the time to do it.

I supported your view quite vehemently, but Erik opposed the option for reasons I could not understand then, though he was claiming the reasons had been extensively discussed.

Since what you suggest is requesting work from a developper, and since one of the developper strongly oppose it, there is very little chance it is ever done.

Erik explained to me off-line why he considered he was right, so I do not feel free to report his arguments, and I think he will be certainly much more fluent to explain his position (if he does not think it has been discussed ad-nauseam :-)).

It should be admitted once and for all that regular users are quite low in the hierarchy. An alternate solution (not so good, but better than what it was before) has been the [[pages for undeletion]] setting and the great improvment brought to the previously horrible undeletion process.

But all in all, the only real option left is to ask to be a sysop (that was why I finally gave up and accepted being one, after I realised Erik would never accept this see-a-deleted-article-even-if-not-sysop-even-though-part-of-the-community

Admitedly, some of Erik arguments were good (yes), but this was not a community decision, just a good push over, with good classical arguments used to kill a discussion, such as "this was already discussed ad nauseam" or distraction with "we can't let people see copyvio".

With the latter argument, I will indicate that my proposition then, was :

what about adding an additional case when proceeding to a deletion, to check in case the deletion was done because of a copyvio. In that case, the deleted article is stamped as *cp* in the database. After say two months in the db, a marked *cp* deleted article will be automatically and permanently deleted from the database. This would reduce dramatically the above mentionned risk of letting loggued in user chance to see something they should not, and reduce the risk of Wikipedia being "attacked" for having cp stuff in its database.

Well, though I thought Erik arguments were good, I also thought this proposition of mine was quite decent...but...well, I got no feedback, and since I am no developper, it is out of question it will ever be done.

So, I can only recommand that you climb a level in the hierarchy, because unfortunately, as long as a sysop is not willing to undelete a page to suit your curiosity...you are out :-)

Incidentally, if you need such an undeletion, you are welcome to ask me. I sometimes drop by and do so even if I do not let comments :-)

Because every user should have a right to see a deleted page to give his opinion on it.

Otherwise, it is just admitting only sysops can give an enlightened opinion on articles.

And yes, so-called black sheeps have the right to see deleted articles as much as so-called white sheeps ihmo.

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