On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 14:15:52 +0100, Timwi wrote:
One idea I was toying with in my mind recently is this. When sysops delete an article, the article goes back to saying "Wikipedia does not have an article with this title yet." Maybe we should actually let everyone (including anonymous users) know that there used to be an article, and (this is the important part) show the reason for its deletion.
That wouldn't work with the way things are currently deleted as sysops usually don't type a reason when deleting speedy deletion candidates. They leave the full text of the article as the deletion reason, which helps others to check what has been deleted as any user can read this text in the deletion log.
As an alternative, I've added the following to [[MediaWiki:Noarticletext]]: * If you created an article under this title previously, it may have been deleted. See [[Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion#The cases|candidates for speedy deletion]] for possible reasons.
Perhaps this will help explain to newcomers where their article went.
Angela.