This follows some discussion in a recent thread Timwi started about adminship. Deletion policies -- specifically the visibility of and accountability for deletion of articles and images -- are extremely slanted towards admins, and towards hiding their actions. This is clearly not an intended effect; but it likely results from the fact the the people discussing and implementing admin interfaces are all logged in as administrators while testing them. Even as an administrator, whe I go to a deleted page, or try to track down a deleted image, it is hard to identify who deleted a given page, and what reason was given -- the list of deleted revisions is not coordinated with the deletion log. For images it is worse: I don't know of a way to see the file history for a deleted image, and not just for its page. [[Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion]] doesn't use subpages; has no effective archive; and its history is too busy to allow effective browsing back more than a few weeks. Recent comments from IFD: "(Thanks for notifying the creator; I forgot that.)" Here's an image which was supposedly "in commons", and clearly marked PD by its uploader, but was orphaned. It doesn't seem to be in commons after all. And the uploader wasn't notified... although he hasn't edited in the past week, so probably wouldn't have seen the message in time to respond, anyway. It's a shame to see work erased in this fashion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jane_austen.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_de… I hope that we can a) fix image-deletion policy, so that we are NOT deleting useful content, and on a more fundamental level, b) make image deletion temporary*, not permanent, with a special "permanently delete" option that is used far more rarely. --Sj * It would be fine if there were a slow, off-wiki way to extract an old deleted image revision; say an on-wiki way for anyone to see a list of all revisions of a deleted image, and a separate fileserver where anyone? admins? could go to request a specific deleted revision. Then there could be a page for deleted-image requests...