[WikiEN-l] Showing the deletion log on the article creation page?

[William Pietri]

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