On 6/22/07, Chuck Smith <chuckssmith(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1) [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.
2) 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
3) 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]].
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com