- [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it
was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
That brings up the question of what exactly the point of deletion is, then. Users can already get the text articles deleted for innocuous reasons from any number of friendly administrators, and if they don't know where to ask, that's something that the English Wikipedia should solve itself by editing the appropriate message.
Casual users don't even know who administrators are to ask them for the article. The point of deletion is to delete the article, but if people want to see the archive, then they can still see it, but they realize it's not an "approved" Wikipedia article. As a compromise, we could allow only those users who have previously edited the article to be able to see its review process and former article easily. At the very least, all users should be able to see that an article was formerly deleted, so they don't waste their time starting to write a new one.
- There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion
(and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted.
Posting deletion logs was tried just now and changed, because it's ugly and because it partly defeats the point of deletion when it quotes the content right on the very page it was supposed to have been deleted from.
Possibly it would be interesting to allow a custom message to be added to a deleted article by admins, without actually recreating the article.
So, a user returns from their two week vacation and finds their article deleted. Even though a long process occurred where people debated it, to their eyes it looks like the article just up and disappeared for no reason. They have no way to go and even see why. So then they'll see that the time they spent on Wikipedia was wasted and reach the conclusion that "Wikipedia sucks." ... and in this case, I would have to agree with them. If something was deleted, then interested individuals should at least be given the decency to be able to see the reasons why and a link to the deletion review process.
- Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD.
Hard to see how this would be implemented without a fair amount of special-case code being written specifically for the English Wikipedia or whatever.
This is really simple. IF article is up for deletion for more than 12 hours THEN email all users who have this article on their watch list. I say more than 12 hours so that people can't use this to just spam lots of users with inappropriate AfD status. This should work in all Wikipedias, not just English.
I hope this clarifies my points.
Best wishes, Chuck