It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.
The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them.
I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive.
Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd.
Since you got voted down, I see where you're coming from, and past discussions about Wikipedia on HN has revealed that a non-trivial number of HN members have only a surprisingly superficial understanding or experience with Wikipedia, I'll attempt to further explain.
The Anna Patterson one is absolutely a case of where the proposed solution achieves the desired effect (in my opinion). redthrowaway hasn't mentioned whether he or she agrees about the Patterson situation, but that's fine, because it's neither here nor there.
What happens on Wikipedia is that people drive by and will literally create an aritcle like "Shitfuck" and will literally write something like "a shitfuck is a guy named jason form cedar springs". seconds later the page content is changed by them again to something like: "a shitfuck is a guy named jason from cedar springs he really likes to shit but he never gets to fuck".
The proposed solution is to retain all deleted articles. redthrowaway points out this isn't a realistic approach in light of these types of new articles. Opposition to redthrowaway here seems to be in the case where multiple someones somewhere care do care about the information in the Anna Patterson article. Is the Anna Patterson article at all similar to the shitfuck incident? Is someone somewhere going to come along and constructively improve that one?
In case you're wondering, "yeah, but how often does that kind of thing really happen?" It happens. A lot.
"The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap."
So fucking what?
Bits are so cheap they're damn near free, and we have pretty good search technology these days. Who gives a shit if there is some crusty data that nobody cares about lying around?
There's a big difference between CSD ("Criterion for Speedy Deletion") and AfD ("Articles for Deletion") here.
Something like Nemerle is obviously an interesting article and a failure of the AfD process. I've never done a DRV (Deletion Review) before, so I might look through Christopher Monsanto's deletions.
But there ARE good reasons to delete content. I new page patrol on English Wikipedia and see thousands of articles created which are nothing more than:
"asdfasdfasdf tim in year 6 of somesuch high school is teh GAY!!1"
and they should rightly be deleted. Usually they are CSDed within minutes and usually deleted very quickly thereafter.
The CSD process works for this kind of thing. And occasionally things slip past the CSD process and need PROD/PROD BLP/AfD. But I do think the Nemerle deletion was definitely an example of the fallacy of deletionism.
It isn't a hard drive space issue. All deleted articles are kept in the database.
Are you seriously advocating that if someone comes and posts an article in main-space which is nothing but an advert for a crappy little garage band or some kid creating an article about how his friends are gay or whatever shouldn't be deleted?
How about instead of deleting them they are blocked from crawlers and all links are rel=nofollowed? That way the information is still available to anyone who knows it exists, but it won't show up in searches. I'd be fine if this is done via an overlay site with Wikipedia as the backend, or better yet, like showdead on HN (which I keep enabled, since sometimes an account gets killed for a single post and the other posts are interesting).
Yeah, so what? No harm is done. Revert bad changes to articles people care about, and ignore articles that nobody cares about. If people actually someone start visiting these 'bad' articles, that means nothing more than you've just identified another avenue for expansion.
That turns Wikipedia into geocities, which is not its role or purpose. There have to be criteria for inclusion. If you have a bunch of articles with unverifiable information, you aren't doing your job as an encyclopedia. Quality matters.
Wikipedia relies on volunteers to do updates, corrections, and repair of vandalism. Storage is cheap but their time on this thankless work (just look at this thread—and we're relatively civil!) is a limited resource, and the thinner you spread them, the more unusable (outdated, mistaken, and actively misleading) the results will be. If you want a boundless supply of crap content, the union of everything anyone ever bothered to write, we already have one: the web.
It's not the admins. There are relatively few of them, and they really don't nominate pages for deletion very often. When a page is nominated, it's the community that argues and the admin only deletes if there's clear consensus. The problem is that deletionists flock to AfDs like it's Mecca, and inclusionists are too busy writing content.
Probably instead of deleting, this articles should be moved to sublayers. In this case "programming sublayer". If you don't subscribe to it, you won't see the article and links to it.
