On 6/22/07, Chuck Smith chuckssmith@gmail.com wrote:
- [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it
was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
The software would then need to be able to distinguish between all the various reasons that pages get deleted; this would end up being very project specific, since each project has standards for deletion that are different, even if only slightly.
Most projects have methods for the recovery of deleted content in uncontroversial cases, and I think it is preferable to have sysops decide what is or is not controversial rather than having the software decide.
- There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion
(and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted. Today, if a newbie to Wikipedia comes to a deleted article, they are basically told that the article went through a process and was deleted. I imagine it would be very shocking for someone to return after a two week vacation and discover that one of their beloved articles has been put to the AfD without them even being notified.
This is a matter of customising the interface. Enwiki does this, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Noarticletext
- Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD. Many people do not visit Wikipedia for a week, but still care very deeply about articles on their watchlist and may have put a lot of work into the article at hand and would like to have a say in the debate about whether an article should be deleted. These users should at least be notified by email when an article is put up for AfD review.
I believe that email notification was disabled on the larger projects for performance reasons; I would expect that there would be comparable performance issues for notification for only certain events. There would be far less emails going out, but instead it would be necessary to parse every edit for something matching an AfD template or similar.
Again, there is a social rather than a technical solution that achieves the same end: encouraging people to email major contributors to articles they nominate for deletion using [[Special:Emailuser]].