[WikiEN-l] Display reason for article deletion to anons? (was: anons and new articles)

Sun Aug 8 13:42:24 UTC 2004

On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 14:15:52 +0100, 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.

That wouldn't work with the way things are currently deleted as sysops
usually don't type a reason when deleting speedy deletion candidates.
They leave the full text of the article as the deletion reason, which
helps others to check what has been deleted as any user can read this
text in the deletion log.

As an alternative, I've added the following to [[MediaWiki:Noarticletext]]: 
 * If you created an article under this title previously, it may have
been deleted. See [[Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion#The
cases|candidates for speedy deletion]] for possible reasons.

Perhaps this will help explain to newcomers where their article went.

Angela.