Is there any way of searching or browsing archives for titles or contents of past articles that have been deleted (e.g. because somebody considered them to be stub articles or articles of little importance). It's often much easier to develop a stub article or an existing article "of little importance" than create a similar article from scratch. Can (or does) Wikipedia search find such articles? LittleBen (talk) 17:02, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

For titles, search the deletion log (go to Special:Log & select the deletion log.) Words in titles of afd'd articles can be found by searching for the key word in the WP section of Special:Search. If you find something that looks likely, ask an admin to check, & they will undelete to your user space if it seems promising & not copyvio. Some admins, like myself, do this regularly. I do not know any way of actually searching except by using such mirrors as Deletionpedia--which is 4 years out of date, or the Wayback machine, both of which have major limitations. Presumably the various wikipedia dumps could be searched, but I think this will miss those which have been added and then deleted between dumps, which are the majority. Sometimes copies of deleted WP articles are to be found in various places on the web--particularly the web sites of the subjects of the articles. DGG ( talk ) 19:54, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. It seems that speedy deletion rules (as applied to newly-created stub articles, at least) have recently been tightened—probably due at least in part to your good work. Back in January I was lucky to catch (and have restored) a recently-deleted article that somebody thought was "not notable". But there surely must be a number of short but useful articles that were not being actively watched and were deleted by trigger-happy people unfamiliar with the topic. It would be useful if the deletion log could be filtered by article category, or if people who are familiar with a category could "opt in" to be automatically notified when something in that category is proposed for deletion.

Change of topic, but do you know where user interface changes are suggested and discussed? In particular, I think that people creating new articles should know how to search categories—Wikipedia search does not search categories by default: Often when there is no article with a name that exactly matches a searched-for term there *is* a category by that name. Users who don't know how to search categories—a user has to know how to bring up the Special Search box, and know to click Advanced, to do that—are liable to create near-duplicates of existing articles but with different names. LittleBen (talk) 08:01, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

There is Speedy Deletion Wikia[1] - but see User:Mdupont/SpeedyDeletionWikia. Dougweller (talk) 13:37, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for the heads up—I added my voice to the discussion. LittleBen (talk) 15:01, 22 July 2012 (UTC)