Is something like this at all feasible?

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: William Pietri william@scissor.com Date: 01-Jun-2007 13:38 Subject: [WikiEN-l] Showing the deletion log on the article creation page? To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

I just got a note from a user who was upset that we had deleted an article that he had recreated. We even salted it after this deletion, because it had been recreated repeatedly. However, he didn't know that he was recreating something that failed an AfD; it just looks like [[Desktop Tower Defense]] was a favorite game and he was excited nobody had written about it yet.

He's absolutely right that it was rude not to tell him that we had deleted the article before. He wasted a lot of time and we could have saved his goodwill for something else. Plus, we had to clean up the mess. A bad situation all around.

What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the article has actually been deleted in the past.

Thanks,

William

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