drh added on 2008-11-16 23:40:56:
The control artifacts that describe wiki changes contain a manditory W card that holds the content of the wiki page. Perhaps we can extend the spec to make the W card optional. If the W card is omitted from the most recent wiki page artifact for a particular page, then we consider that page to have been deleted and it does not appear on the list of all "active" wiki pages. The artifact with the omitted W card causes a timeline entry that says something like "page deleted".

What privilege is needed to delete a page? Seems like deleting pages is something that should normally be denied anonymous users. Do we need a new privilege letter for "delete wiki page"?

Perhaps there should be two lists: One list of all active wiki page and another list of all wiki pages, active and deleted.

kkinnell added on 2008-11-17 02:24:55:
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

My previous wiki experience is that either admins or owners can delete whole pages, but you can get into knotty problems defining ownership if several people have edited a page. I would think that privelege to delete should be the same as the privlege required to shun. They're very similar operations, really.

Might want to consider closing this ticket, as not_a_bug, or something similar. I was definitely a little put off by the *large* number of open tickets in the backlog. Went to the oldest and found that a discussion had been completed around the topic, but it was never closed out.

FWIW:

http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fileformat.wiki#summary

making the W card optional would appear to be kosher in the sense that a Wiki manifest is still uniquely identifiable as such because it requires an L-card. Removing the W card sounds to me like a nice solution, but would break on older clients, which assert that the required W-card is there:

if( p->zWiki==0 ) SYNTAX("missing W-card on wiki");

Maybe go ahead and make it optional now (remove the assert), but don't yet place any special meaning on it being missing (just treat it as an empty page for the time being)? Then allow that to simmer for a version or three before filtering them out of wiki lists and otherwise treating them as if they were deleted?