The changelog is still there on the servers and can be accessed by the Wikipedia administrators. The page can also be restored with it's full changelog, although I don't think that's done very often.
I makes very hard to re-start a new article. Why start from scratch when we could re-use and improve the old article? This is discouraging.
I am moderately tech-savvy and had a WikiPedia account for years. But going into the deletion-review process WikiPedia bureaucracy is a lot of work. Pretty honestly I looked at the process and it looks so complicated that I think I would rather write a brand new article.
Articles are usually deleted for good reasons, so it's usually discouraged to do this for those same reasons. If it's just due to notability, you could probably ask an admin to give you a hand and give you the text of the old revision in the draft space, although I've never seen it done. It's usually a better bet to start of a blank slate, since that doesn't carry with it the smell of a previously deleted article, even if that deletion might not have been made with good reason.
> But going into the deletion-review process WikiPedia bureaucracy is a lot of work. Pretty honestly I looked at the process and it looks so complicated that I think I would rather write a brand new article.
The new article part of that is probably somewhat intended behaviour. The deletion-review process isn't as bad as it seems from all the pages. They're just very verbose just to have everything documented. People are usually nice enough to point in the right direction if something is amiss. They just want things done correctly and will guide the process thusly.
