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.
That brings up the question of what exactly the point of deletion is,
then. Users can already get the text articles deleted for innocuous
reasons from any number of friendly administrators, and if they don't
know where to ask, that's something that the English Wikipedia should
solve itself by editing the appropriate message.
Casual users don't even know who administrators are to ask them for
the article. The point of deletion is to delete the article, but if
people want to see the archive, then they can still see it, but they
realize it's not an "approved" Wikipedia article. As a compromise, we
could allow only those users who have previously edited the article to
be able to see its review process and former article easily. At the
very least, all users should be able to see that an article was
formerly deleted, so they don't waste their time starting to write a
new one.
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.
Posting deletion logs was tried just now and changed, because it's
ugly and because it partly defeats the point of deletion when it
quotes the content right on the very page it was supposed to have been
deleted from.
Possibly it would be interesting to allow a custom message to be added
to a deleted article by admins, without actually recreating the
article.
So, a user returns from their two week vacation and finds their
article deleted. Even though a long process occurred where people
debated it, to their eyes it looks like the article just up and
disappeared for no reason. They have no way to go and even see why.
So then they'll see that the time they spent on Wikipedia was wasted
and reach the conclusion that "Wikipedia sucks." ... and in this case,
I would have to agree with them. If something was deleted, then
interested individuals should at least be given the decency to be able
to see the reasons why and a link to the deletion review process.
3) Email
auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD.
Hard to see how this would be implemented without a fair amount of
special-case code being written specifically for the English Wikipedia
or whatever.
This is really simple. IF article is up for deletion for more than 12
hours THEN email all users who have this article on their watch list.
I say more than 12 hours so that people can't use this to just spam
lots of users with inappropriate AfD status. This should work in all
Wikipedias, not just English.
I hope this clarifies my points.
Best wishes,
Chuck