On Dec 4, 2004, at 5:59 AM, Frank v Waveren wrote:
Those of you on enwiki may have noticed my recent attempts to democraticise page deletion. I feel the current deletion system on unwiki is not ideal.
Please see existing discussion on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ShaneKing/vfd_proposal http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletion_management_redesign
This seems like an obvious way of implementing things, however when mediawiki was designed it wasn't done like that, which leads me to ask: Are there technical reasons why it wasn't? Deleted pages are already kept in the database, so it wouldn't cost more space.
The chief reason to be deleting something (as opposed to redirecting it to a more appropriate article or replacing it with a better one) is that it includes copyrighted material that we don't have permission to distribute. This necessitates not being able to have _just anybody_ come along and view or undelete it.
A system that keeps deleted pages invisible but also makes it easy to delete and undelete is a little trickier to do than a simple administrative action, and no one's got round to it yet.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)