TrashCan

If TrashCan were implemented, then “delete page” would be easy to undo. (Making things easy to undo is generally a good thing – this helps people CommunityWiki:BeBold, and reduces the “are you SURE?” dialogs and other annoyances that tend to grow around things that cannot be un-done).

Whenever someone deletes a page, the wiki software

• appends the PageName to the special page called TrashCan.
• appends a copy of all of the page contents to TrashCan.
• deletes the page (makes the page non-existant, breaking all links to it – not merely making the page empty).

The TrashCan page grows and grows like RecentChanges; perhaps someone deletes the oldest bits every month or so.

Oops! Wrong one! How do I un-delete ?

Go to the TrashCan page, click the question mark by the PageName to re-create the page, and cut-and-paste the text into it.

Then the wiki should be restored to the state it was in before that “delete page” incident.

(was IdeasToPlace #115.)

PWiki2 has a TrashCan feature. Every page has a deleted field which is stored in the pages table. When a page is deleted, this field is simply marked as true along with every version of that page. TrashcanTest shows the output of a recently built function to list deleted pages and with the ability to restore the deleted pages easily. --JamesMills

OddMuse rides deletion on top of the PageCluster system. You put a page into the “DeletedPage” cluster, and then after 30 days, it’s deleted. We still haven’t figured out how we feel about the PageCluster system, over on CommunityWiki:CommunityWiki. – LionKimbro

Contributors:

• Visual:DavidCary – originally called it RecentDeletedPages
• LionKimbro TaoRiver:LionKimbro – suggested the name “TrashCan”