Karl Eichwalder wrote:
BTW, it is very strange that every tiny change is listed on the watchlist, but a deletion is not.
This is a side effect of how the watchlist works and how page deletion works.
The watchlist is displayed by looking up the page records of all pages on your watchlist, and sorting by their last edit times. If a page is deleted, it no longer has a page record, and won't show up in the list. There's no record, so there's no datestamp to sort it into place by.
Similarly, edits to deleted pages no longer show up in a user's contributions history.
There are some potential improvements that can be made here; hopefully I can work this into MediaWiki 1.5 which should be ready sometime this spring (April-May).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)