[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hierarchy

Mon Dec 8 11:26:35 UTC 2003

>>>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>>Undeletion should never require more official validation than deletion.

>> Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>And generally less, right, since after all a person can always 'undelete'
>>by just starting the article over and copying and pasting the text?

>Toby Bartels wrote:

> Not entirely.

> For one thing, your solution destroys the edit history.
> Also, only admins can even view the text that they want to copy and paste
> (although that point is not relevant to current issue,
> since it is only about relative numbers of administrators).

> In short, undeleting by your method is not as good as undeleting by
software.
> That is one reason why undeleting shouldn't be unduly restricted.

If undeletion were made unrestricted then I think we would also have to
allow everyone to view the text of deleted articles.  Otherwise we would
have people undeleting in order to view the text and (unless deletion was
also unrestricted) being unable to delete again once they had done so.

I can also see a big increase in "deletion wars" if the ability to undelete
is general.

I'm not saying that I think the ability to undelete /shouldn't/ be opened
up, just seeing a few problems that should be looked at first.

Regards

sannse