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connelm@msn.com wrote:
On en.wiktionary.org, the broad majority of sysops use the feature in [[wikt:WT:PREFS]] to override the deletion message unconditionally, to prevent libelous information from appearing in the deletion logs. Since our deletion logs ARE harvested, it seemed rather prudent. The only sysops that don't have it turned on, are sysops that essentially never delete stuff.
With the appearance of the deletion log on deleted pages, we're revisiting how we handle misspellings. It would be nice to know if this lovely new feature will stay around long enough to make a decent test of the new method (not yet started.)
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).
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.
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.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)