Comment by throwaway81523

Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.