This is basically a hybrid of revision deletion and the "new field" page deletion alternative; see [[mw:Requests for comment/Page_deletion#page_deleted_field]].

In this system, if you delete all the revisions in a page, then page.page_deleted is set to "1". The page is then treated by MediaWiki as a deleted page (wikilinks turn red, etc.). The archive table is deprecated.

It would probably be easiest to enable it by a configuration setting that people could turn on or off, although another possibility would be to create a bunch of hooks and let an extension do the rest.

Version: 1.24rc
Severity: enhancement