Hello. I'm posting here because I don't know where exactly I should be asking this so sorry if this is the innapropiate place. I'm looking for somebody who can tell me, or tell me where I do have to look to know if a WM project does back-up deleted revisions or not. I ask this because I'm planning a rewrite of the Meta-Wiki's deletion policy that states the project does not keep back-up of deleted revisions; and whish to know if this is still true. Thank you in advance.
Topic on Project:Support desk
On the dumps page, there is a non-public file "Deleted page and revision data. (private)" which i would assume would contain such information. Well I wouldn't be surprised if back in the day it wasn't backed up, I would be shocked if that still was the case.
Someone like ArielGlenn would probably be a good person to ask.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Deletion_policy&diff=next&oldid=340788 I would actually be surprised if this was true even in 2006. I could see it being the case pre-1.5, back when deleted revision text was stored in a separate table, but that's 2004-2005.
I've checked the earliest deletion log entry at meta which is this and I can see content inside; however I can't say the same for very old images that once they were deleted they got lost forever (note there's no "file history"). Best regards.
Well back in the day we didn't save deleted images at all. They were permanently deleted the moment the admin hit delete (Many a flame war was started between Commons and sister projects over images that were deleted, back in the day)