I've noticed a few times over the past weeks that a talk page of a
deleted page has also been deleted, for no special reason.
This includes pages with an edit history that were prodded or
speedied, or ones that were useful and informative but not notable, or
ones that were the subject of a contentious AfD.
These discussions about an article -- including about its deletion and
notability -- should be preserved just as deletion discussions are.
They will be useful if the article returns later, if others try to
determine whether it should have been deleted, and are a record of
discussions about knowledge by people who cared about the topic.
Where should they be preserved? Right now deletion guidelines on
en:wp allow for *speedy deletion* of any talk page that has no article
page, unless "It contains deletion discussion that is not logged
elsewhere"... I'm not sure where that guideline came from, since
there are certainly pages that have gone through a "Delete and rewrite
from scratch" where the intent is for an article to be written and the
talk page [pre-deletion, related to article content, standards of
research, interesting sources, and the like] is a part of that. If
the original talk page isn't the right place to keep this non-deletion
information, where should it go?
++SJ