On 6/11/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd say it's more or less certain that we want to keep an indicator that the page previously existed. It's too annoying to have _no_ indication, both for the cases where people keep recreating things that shouldn't probably be there and for the cases where people go back to revisit their articles to find them _gone without a trace_ beause they didn't follow the deletion processes (whether byzantine like on Wikipedia or ad-hoc like on Meta or www.mediawiki.org).
Definitely agree.
Whether we want it spewing long, detailed logs by default, however, is
rather more debateable. I don't really like the current view. It's overly technical and spews potentially scary or annoying stuff at people, which is no fun.
Agree, as well.
My recommendation would be to just have a little box with the note that
the page used to exist and was deleted, and you can [see the deletion logs] to find out when and why.
Well, I think this is much more in line with what Rob Church has now done -- that is, it provides a warning only if the page has been previously deleted, and in a slightly prettier manner. I've also removed the log from Noarticletext, on the basis that the user has not yet expressed an editorial interest. I don't, however, like the idea of removing the log from the view altogether. Would it perhaps do to simply remove the deletion _reason_ from the displayed log, perhaps with a link to the reason or allow the user to expand particular entries to see the reason? Obviously, if the reasons were explanatory, it would be of great help to have the reason display by default, but I definitely recognize that many of these deletion reasons are R-rated or contain potentially libelous, inflammatory language that may, although it does not find itself in an actual article, be attributed back to Wikipedia.
In any case, I recognize I may well have been a bit too overzealous sticking this in there as it was and am glad that you all have raised your objections -- I hope a compromise can be reached.