I've been doing a lot of work with history merges in the last few months. I started on place names, but then branched out to planets and other fields. However I've found some pages whose page history has been lost. I have collected some info about these pages, as well as other page history oddities, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Graham87/Page_history_observations It would be good if the old history of these pages, especially important pages like Canberra and Glasgow, could be retrieved from the deletion archives. Will the deletion archives ever be cleared again, and if so, under what conditions? About 99.99% of what is in there is garbage, but there is probably valuable history in there that has been deleted by careless admins. For example, the history of the article Turin up to Feburary 2006 was gone due to someone trying to fix a cut-and-paste move. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Turin Also, less seriously, I am curious about the page history of: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_that_are_always_odd as listed on Wikipedia's lamest edit wars. It was deleted for a good reason, but the history would be fun to read. Graham