Undelete page
The ability to undelete pages is the ability to undo a delete page decision.
Allocation of this technological power is a central power struggle in neutral point of view vs. New Troll point of view and in the prevention of sysop vandalism. There are starkly different views of it across different large public wikis:
- Disinfopedia has a strict command and control structure and its chief editor is the only one who can authorize an undelete page operation.
- Wikipedia has a mixed structure where the sysop power structure self-regulates, ineffectively, resulting in the sysop vandalism and sysop vandal point of view mostly dominating wiki management and wiki governance debate. Without the power to undelete pages it becomes difficult or impossible to participate in an edit war against those who do have it, reinforcing the Wikimedia cabal.
- Anarchopedia distributes the power to undelete pages to all users, so that there is effectively no sysop power structure at all; ad hominem delete is this only very slightly more powerful than ad hominem revert as a means of curtailing debate, and no user can actually gain much power over any other in an edit war.
It is very likely that Consumerium Services would adopt very different policies for each of its Wikis. For instance:
- the Develop Wiki could remain an Anarchopedia-style anarchized free-for-all, in keeping with the free software ideal, so anyone can undelete in this wiki.
- Research Wiki might need to be run more like Wikipedia with a sysop power structure or bureaucracy that must refer any factionally defined terms (like "trolls") and defer to formal faction representative democracy to augment or replace the Pointy Haired Boss or GodKing who might still exist for legal reasons - to answer to Consumerium Governance Organization for only liability issues. Unlike Wikipedia power users could not delete the page entirely from view - it would simply be "demoted" to development status where disclaimers would apply; page name conflict would be resolved in some way that made it instantly obvious one could find the page and so undelete it by putting it back up as research
- authorized Publish Wiki users might need an ability to simply delete pages that are controversially forwarded to it from the Research Wiki until legal counsel can clear or vet them - this would not delete the page entirely from view as it would remain visible as research, so again any user could retrieve/restore that and so easily undelete pages.
It is not clear if a one wiki model can do this at all or if it could have any policy that would satisfy every faction.