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Allow the history of deleted Wikidata items to be visible for a month
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

When an admin makes a decision to delete an item it's currently hard to understand how the decision is made because Wikidata doesn't display the data of the deleted item.
This goes against the general spirit of having history pages that allow users to understand the changes that other users make.

That makes it hard to know whether different admins interpret the notability policy the same way or differently.

In most cases I think there's no harm in having the history of deleted items to be temporally visible and thus I request to make it visible.

Event Timeline

Sjoerddebruin subscribed.

Strong oppose: between those deletions there are also privacy violations and other stuff that could be harmful to others. This also seems like quite a technical challenge.

This is not something that should be implemented without a proper discussion. And I don't think Phabricator is the proper medium for that.

We'll do the same thing as Wikipedia in this case. I don't think Wikidata should be any special for this.

This should just be closed invalid per Sjoerddebruin. Christian, if he desires information about a particular deletion, can ask any admin in good faith to provide him information about that deletion.

Note that T98052, a similar task, was declined too.

@Lydia_Pintscher : Wikipedia articles have a name that's human-readable and when they are deleted it's clear what the article is about. That's not true for Wikidata items where the item ID doesn't tell a user what the item is about.
Additionally many items do get deleted in Wikidata without noticing the person who created the item beforehand in a way that's not typical for Wikipedia.

@Lydia_Pintscher : Wikipedia articles have a name that's human-readable and when they are deleted it's clear what the article is about. That's not true for Wikidata items where the item ID doesn't tell a user what the item is about.
Additionally many items do get deleted in Wikidata without noticing the person who created the item beforehand in a way that's not typical for Wikipedia.

I think so. Everyone should be able to check out old labels (not the rest of the item), unless otherwise selected by the corresponding administrator. See T154289 (duplicate).

It would be useful to maybe do some to write item titles in the DR pages rather than just rely on the (uniformative) item number. Is it possible to subst: something when a deletion request is being made? I am not against the deletion and hiding of sensitive material, that is possible through all the wikis by other means. At this stage the DR archives are next to useless; hardly worth keeping them.

@Izno. I would have thought at a wiki that the context of a deletion should be visible for all users. Having CC0 does not equate to knowledge-0 and nobody should have to default to "ask an admin" for basic information for most items. That is against the principles of wiki-ism IMNSHO