Bryan Derksen said:
If we
were to follow both the policy that if something is deleted via a
VfD then a new article about it should never be created, and also the
policy that VfD is a quality-control mechanism (as you suggest in your
other posting sent around the same time as this one), this would lead
to some articles being declared forever uncreatable simply because the
first attempt to make it was unmitigatedly bad even if there's a
legitimate interest in having an article on that subject. Since
deletion removes old versions from history entirely I don't see what
the point would be, they're gone either way.
A capital concussion of the nail has been detected.
In this specific case the old deleted Wollmann article was already
pretty good IMO. I think the issue is whether the VfD came to the wrong
conclusion about it in the first place.
It was a case of a new editor (me, at the time) ameliorating a poor
article that had been posted for malicious purposes (so they could claim
that Wikipedia, a respected encyclopedia, was against their enemy). Yes,
it's well written. No, Wollmann is not a public person (unless we
undelete the article and make him one). The public/private distinction is
in any case much less relevant outside the USA.