LittleDan wrote:
Nohat (David Friedland) wrote:
Well, seeing as it's now been deleted and I can't see the content, I can't really say whether or not it deserved being deleted. All I can do is guess based on title. Sounds like it ought to have been deleted, but I guess I'll never know for sure...
I can see delted content with the new deletion system; I wonder why you can't. All you do is click on the thing that says something like "See 3 edits before deletion", then you can click on any version and look at it (unless it's perminantly deleted). Maybe the deletion system is broken temporarily.
Or maybe Nohat, like the vast majority of en.Wikipedians, is not an administrator on [[en:]] and can't do any of this.
To be sure, Nohat's comment does seem a bit facetious, since he can ask to see the page on [[Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion]]. And I believe that it was in fact undeleted so that people could see it.
Nevertheless, I think that there's an important point here. It was good of the deleter (I forget now who they were) to report the deletion to the mailing list, since they were unsure as to whether it would be regarded (at least by those most concerned with fairness in deletions) as justified by en.Wikipedia policy. But, having brought it to the list's attention, some list readers -- such as Nohat -- now find themselves unable to look at the situation being discussed.
The solution? I don't see a clear one, outside of software changes. (And which software changes is not entirely obvious either!) The deleter might have mentioned it on the list /before/ deleting, but then why not just put it on [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]]? Yet the whole point was to test the policy on deletion to see if all agreed that there was good reason that it ought to be deleted immediately /without/ being listed.
The bottleneck, it seems to me, is that there are dedicated Wikipedians, such as Nohat, that read the mailing lists and participate in policy but nevertheless are not administrators (for any of various reasons). And we decided some time ago not to force users to become admins. ^_^
-- Toby