Last modified: 2007-06-06 09:14:06 UTC
Today I created a new page (template specifically) at the German Wikipedia. It was deleted within three minutes, as a template by the same name (and same function) had existed before, and it had been the consensus after some discussion that it was not needed actually. If I was noticed that my new old template had been deleted before (with an information were discussion about deletion is preserved), I could have saved some fifteen minutes of my life. Therefore my idea: When someone creates an article that has existed before and was deleted meanwhile, inform the creator during his first edits about this fact in big red letters and give a link to the discussion explaining reasons for the deletion. This could also end neverending creation-deletion cycles of articles, or at least reduce them by some amount.
If the article's deletion debate is a simple function of its name (such as [[w:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{PAGENAME}}]] for enwiki articles), this is possible now with [[m:ParserFunctions]]. Ask your local admins to edit your local [[MediaWiki:Noarticletext]] to use {{#ifexist}} in combination with {{#switch}} to create the effect you're looking for. This does not, however, address deletions where no such consistent page exists (such as speedies or RFDs on enwiki). For the time being, though, this is a partial workaround.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 7691 ***
