Wikipedia talk:Viewing deleted articles/Archived discussion

message: I would like to propose, after discussing it on the #wikipedia IRC channel, that regular users be able to view deleted pages - probably just Special:Undelete/pagename without a restore button. This would make VfU a lot more useful, and help soften the effect that deletion has. The main reasons we delete pages as it is is, as far as I know, is to keep the article namespace clean of non-encyclopedic material, to prevent search engines from archiving this material, and to prevent copyright violations from being on the site. For copyright violations, I'd propose that we simply have a developer remove the page from history as soon as we get a complaint, or have two types of deletion, one of which flags the deleted page as a copyvio and doesn't allow non-sysops to read it. Any suggestions? Yelyos 23:07, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
:I support the idea of non-sysops being able to view deleted versions in the interests of transparency - but the copyvios issue would need to be addressed. Although, to be honest, if sysops can view deleted copyvios, we probably have a problem. Copyvios surely need to be hard-deleted as soon as identified? zoney ♣ talk 23:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Legally, Wikipedia is only required to delete a copyright violation as soon as a complaint is recieved, so we could simply handle the problem by editing the history of pages as soon as we recieve complaints. I'm not sure how scalable this is (I doubt the number of copyright violation notices would be that high), although we could empower some very trusted users (sysops maybe, or a class of 'trusted user' beyond sysop) with the ability to replace history versions of deleted pages with copyright violation notices if it gets overwhelming for the current developers. Yelyos 23:38, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
If this is going to be done, I'd suggest that it be done in a way which allows use of Special:Export for these files.  And I repeat my vow to never participate on VfD or VfU again if I'm given access to view deleted articles. anthony (see warning) 00:13, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: This is a great idea. Out of interest, Anthony, why that vow? Mark Richards 17:48, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Because the only reason I oppose deletion of articles which contain useful information is because I can't easily access that information after it has been deleted. anthony (see warning) 17:54, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia's inclusion policy is broad, and despite the level of acrimony at VfD, there are extremely few articles that are deleted that are useful to anyone in any way at all.  Maybe if you consider thousands to be extremely few.  We already have problems with advocacy sites deep-linking to a particular version of a Wikipedia article that reflects their POV.  Why is this a problem?  Your use of the term deep-linking is especially suspect.  That's a term which is generally used by proprietary sites.  It brings up images of Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com Inc., where Ticketmaster tried to claim that making web links was actually illegal.  Deep Linking is Good Linking.  Permitting casual users to view deleted pages would pose this same problem, and would pose the problem of title spam as seen in the alt.* newsgroup hierarchy.  There's no reason we have to permit casual users.  The proposal specifically says "regular users", and we could restrict it even more than that, to "users who specifically request it".  anthony 警告 16:43, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Allowing non-sysops to view deleted pages (from the village pump)