Thomas Dalton wrote:
You could narrow it down by looking at all deleted articles over a certain size which don't have "copyvio" or "copyright" in the deletion reason. You should be able to narrow it down a fair bit that way - you then have to plough through the articles manually. A deleted article that might be almost an FAC is quite likely not formatted correctly yet, so you won't be able to automatically search for links and refs etc.
I personally read "candidates" as "articles that could, theoretically, be improved to FA-level." Mostly because many comprehensive articles simply cannot.
-Jeff