(Prompted by the ongoing discussion on wikien about who can see deleted content)

I think it makes sense to distinguish between deletion of the "copyvio/takedown notice/vandalism" form, from deletion because a topic is deemed 'unencyclopedic' or 'non-notable'. Let us call these, for the sake of argument, "hard deletion" and "soft deletion".

I also think it makes sense for every logged-in user (hence not spiders or searchbots) to be able to see soft-deleted content, even a list of soft-deleted articles. Admins can still be the only ones who can delete articles (soft or hard), and the only ones who can undelete articles. Other users can copy-and-paste deleted text into a new article, just as they could repaste deleted text from their PCs into a new article with the old name. But in general they won't, since deletion is a clear community decision, and repeatedly recreating deleted articles is easily-recognizable vandalism.