The core problem here is that things are being /deleted/ (in a permanent, no-longer-accessible-for-review fashion): in today's day and age (I'm willing to believe this will change in another 10-15 years) I find it almost unfathomable that Wikimedia really has to /delete/ old content rather than simply "putting it in the attic".
To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality.
Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline".
However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies).
But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic).
And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost.
So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators.
And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner).
Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted".
If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help.
Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in.
But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society.
Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.
This feature exists in the software. But only people with administrator rights have permission to view deleted pages.
If you want to see a deleted page you can usually ask an admin. They will generally restore it somewhere where you can see it unless it was deleted for some privacy reason.
Well, that sucks, and demonstrates that this would be absolutely trivial to make work correctly. This feature (in the normal "not removed due to legality or privacy concerns" case) should not require an administrator any more than viewing the normal edit history of a page.
Yeah, I wasn't supporting the current policy... but it looks difficult to change it. Your proposal has come up from time to time, and it's been strongly opposed by the legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal reasons: "community adoption of such a disastrous policy would create an actual emergency that would likely require Board intervention" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposa...
To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality.
Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline".
However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies).
But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic).
And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost.
So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators.
And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner).
Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted".
If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help.
Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in.
But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society.
Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.