Charlotte Webb wrote:
Another excellent idea, but how would you know where to look? Even if you can view the deleted edits, how would you know which titles to look under? Tool-server access might be be a necessity. Get a list of red-link titles according to number of deleted edits (this could be extremely helpful for finding "merge and delete" incidents), or any other meaningful filter you can think of.
I used two approaches, neither of which were particularly efficient but both of which scored more hits than I'd like. One was simply skimming over old AfD daily archives looking for the magic words, or for plain "delete" results that had blue links. Had to go in and check them manually, but that wasn't hard. The other was to pick a random "respected" long-time editor and start skimming through his list of deleted edits looking for blue links. Manual checking is of course required there too, but usually there's no reason not to restore such edits.
It's a pity our deletion mechanism doesn't distinguish between stuff deleted for "hard" reasons like copyright violation and stuff deleted for "soft" reasons such as notability, it'd make it easier to give access to stuff like this that could still be of value. I recall there's been discussion in the past of creating a "deleted:" namespace for such things, anyone know if anything's likely to come of that?