"Saving storage space" has literally nothing to do with any of Wikipedia's policies. If you thought that's why articles got deleted, you don't understand the policy, and Chesterton's Fence controls.
The vast majority of articles that get deleted are speedy deleted. This can be due to things like obvious vandalism (things like teenagers putting swearwords etc.) , articles about random people that are really just a breach of privacy and not helping anyone, strange conspiracy theories, advertising, spam, self-aggrandizement, copyright violations, etc. In short: Things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. This is why the history is normally hidden as well. [1]
The articles that get any sort of discussion at all are the edge cases where a single patroller by themselves can't make up their mind. And due to the nature of being edge cases, they can indeed attract quite some discussion!
If an article is at all redeemable, it is (should be) kept and expanded instead.
[1] Normally you want to keep around a copy of "deleted" content in case someone wants to do some sort of check or audit, or might perhaps want to salvage some data that might still be useful. In certain extreme situations like particularly egregious copyright violations, doxing or someone putting up CP or what-have-you, page history access can be denied to admins as well.
The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.
Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view?
I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really ought to stay dead – things like copyright infringement, doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net too wide when resurfacing those removed pages.
That is even more damning - it does not even allow the "saving storage space" excuse.
"Saving storage space" has literally nothing to do with any of Wikipedia's policies. If you thought that's why articles got deleted, you don't understand the policy, and Chesterton's Fence controls.
I know what Chesterton's Fence means, but wish you would elaborate a little on how it relates to the policy.
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The vast majority of articles that get deleted are speedy deleted. This can be due to things like obvious vandalism (things like teenagers putting swearwords etc.) , articles about random people that are really just a breach of privacy and not helping anyone, strange conspiracy theories, advertising, spam, self-aggrandizement, copyright violations, etc. In short: Things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. This is why the history is normally hidden as well. [1]
The articles that get any sort of discussion at all are the edge cases where a single patroller by themselves can't make up their mind. And due to the nature of being edge cases, they can indeed attract quite some discussion!
If an article is at all redeemable, it is (should be) kept and expanded instead.
[1] Normally you want to keep around a copy of "deleted" content in case someone wants to do some sort of check or audit, or might perhaps want to salvage some data that might still be useful. In certain extreme situations like particularly egregious copyright violations, doxing or someone putting up CP or what-have-you, page history access can be denied to admins as well.
Do note that there's backups/dumps at approximately monthly intervals, too, that could have helped.
The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_deleted_cont...
Yet the vast majority of articles are deleted for reasons other than legal.
Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view?
I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really ought to stay dead – things like copyright infringement, doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net too wide when resurfacing those removed pages.
That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_reque...
Btw. I was asking this in case deletionpedia hadn't managed to copy all of the articles.
See some of the other comments here, there's actually a procedure to request deleted pages (that are otherwise not problematic).
Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.