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Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia admins.

That is even more damning - it does not even allow the "saving storage space" excuse.

Do note that there's backups/dumps at approximately monthly intervals, too, that could have helped.

"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.

The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do; in fact, you essentially argue that losing the "save space" excuse is fatal to the policy. You need to understand those policies before you can plausibly critique them. You evidently don't, and your critique is consequently implausible.

I read their comment differently. I think they were saying the admins can’t even use the excuse that any specific deletions or deletions generally are necessary to save space, because deleted items are not erased completely, but are still available to admins.

So why don't you explain what they do mean instead of these mysterious repetitions of "you don't understand" and references to concepts (Chesterton's Fence) that aren't obviously applicable to what's being discussed.

I'm not sure what's tricky to understand about this: you have to understand why the fence was put up in the first place before you can safely knock it down. That's it; that's the whole fence. If you want to understand Wikipedia's policies, go read them. They're extensively documented. You can't just make up what you think the rationales for these policies are, knock those false rationales down, and claim you've made any kind of actual argument; you're literally just arguing with yourself.

> The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do;

I assume by "your comment", you mean mine. If so, it does not imply that that was the rationale - in fact, by calling it an excuse, and not a rationale, it implies the opposite - that the real reason is different, and storage space just a (possible) cover.

Because once you remove the storage space excuse, all that remains (besides doxing, copyright, and various legal reasons, which Deletionpedia shows are a small minority of all deleted articles) are various rationalizations on why readers should be kept in the dark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Why_we_ha... explains their reasons (edit: for soft-deleting articles, not for inaccessible history).

That's an answer to an entirely different question. It explains why only 'notable' things get articles, not why deleted articles are only accessible to admins. Perhaps you meant to link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_of_deleted_a... ?

I've read that, and their arguments are wanting. The most convincing is the doxing/legal reasons rationale. What is not convincing is using that rationale to hide the vast majority of articles that were not deleted for those reasons.

The other argument offered was "then what's the difference between a deleted and not deleted article", which is nonsense. By that logic, there is also no difference between deleting some text in an article, and leaving it in, since in both cases it is still accessible in revision history.

Finally there was the "would encourage trolls since their trolling would remain in history", but again, the same argument applies to revision history of non-deleted articles.

Yeah, I misunderstood.

So why don't you contribute something meaningful to the conversation then, instead of vague-hn'ing?

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.

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.

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).

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...

Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.

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