Recently there have been a very large number of deletions of older questions (and answers). Occasionally, this has caused some very helpful answers to be deleted - with no review at all.
Currently SE provides no effective way to review deletions. It is difficult if not impossible to even track deletions because they are displayed only in a (10K+ users) moderation tool of very short length, which frequently quickly overflows (especially during the nightly flood of Community deletions). Consequently many deletions are seen only by the few users who voted to delete.
Given that SE consistently declines all feature requests for tools to track and review deletions (e.g. here), I propose that we discuss community implementable methods of doing so.
For example, one simple solution would be to have a meta thread dedicated to this purpose. We could require that deletion votes can be cast only if an entry has been made into the meta thread linking to the deletion candidate. In effect, this implements a delete votes review queue. (Other means of deletion are outside the scope of this discussion.)
With such a queue, we would have some chance to rescue good answers before they disappear forever (e.g. maybe the question could be improved, or the answer could be migrated to another question, or it could be saved by the author for use in a later question, etc).
deleted:
search keyword for 10k+ (currently mod only) or similar feature-requests would give more for less effort. Maybe we should thus try to bring these feature-requests to a more prominent position. $\endgroup$ – AlexR Mar 29 '15 at 23:45