MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: As far as I understand it we're _legally required_ to preserve the article history if we merge the contents somewhere else. The GFDL requires us to maintain an author list and the way Wikipedia does that is via the edit history. I just hit a case like this a few days back over on [[Talk:Otherkin]], where someone pasted the most recent version of the deleted article [[Draconity]] for potential merging. As it currently stands this looks legally no different than cutting and pasting the entire text of an Encyclopedia Britannica article into a talk page and suggesting it be merged. And since [[Draconity]] itself has already been recreated as a redirect, what is the point of keeping the history deleted anyway? The article's inaccessible to readers either way. As long as an article isn't deleted for copyright or libel reasons, if we've got a redirect sitting there we might as well preserve the article history in case something salvageable is discovered in there one day.

Timwi wrote: Since there are potentially legal issues involved here (I'm not a lawyer but the GFDL seems pretty clear on this matter), perhaps it would be reasonably straightforward getting the deletion policy amended to prevent this kind of history loss. Strict adherence to rules can work both ways.