This is an excellent idea IMO. A friend of mine had one of his articles
deleted and he didn't know what for. He just thought it was a technical
problem and never came back.
Christiaan
On 8 Aug 2004, at 2:15 pm, Timwi wrote:
One idea I was toying with in my mind recently is
this. When sysops
delete an article, the article goes back to saying "Wikipedia does not
have an article with this title yet." Maybe we should actually let
everyone (including anonymous users) know that there used to be an
article, and (this is the important part) show the reason for its
deletion.
If a newbie goes back to see what happened to their article, and they
see it gone, they are more likely to just put it back in (it looks to
them more like a glitch in the system or an accident than a deliberate
deleting). If it actually said "This article was deleted for the
following reason: vandalism", they are more likely to ackowledge that
putting their article back in is going to have the same effect again.