Nathan wrote:
Your suggestion might make sense if there were some greater value to having broad access to deleted content from Wikipedia. Other sites might find something worth seeing among the morass of deleted articles, but a lot of that "content" is poisonous, libelous, or simply and sometimes harmfully wrong. Why would we need to make it easier for people to see that stuff? For the instances where content of relative value is deleted? Those pages would be sort of a needle in a gigantic pile of manure, wouldn't they, and so wouldn't the negatives clearly outweigh the positives on this one?
It's unfortunate that so far we've no mechanism for distinguishing between these different types of deletion. But clearly, a lot of material that's of value to people has been deleted over the years; we have regular controversies over that sort of thing (eg webcomics, characters, episodes, etc.) and we wouldn't have them if people didn't value the stuff that was getting wiped.
The reason I've contributed to Wikipedia over the years is because I enjoy increasing the amount of information that's generally accessible to the world. So yeah, anything that can save material like this is a good thing, IMO. If someone wishes to wade through manure to find gems, why stop them?