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.

After having a think about how best to solve this problem, it seemed best to me to have deletion work the same as editing. The fewer different cases, the fewer problems. The simple solution would be to have an empty page be the same as a non-existant page (and blank/non-existant pages could have edit history). That way page deletion/undeletion would be under the same influences as the adding and deletion of bits of pages.

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.

(if there are any misconceptions about how mediawiki works in this mail please let me know; I'm not a PHP programmer (though I might be forced to become one should I be able to get support for this kind of scheme on enwiki)).