What is the benefit of undeleting a question?

Question

It seems like the bot deleted a hidden question because of lack of activity. I suppose that there might be two ways to undelete it, either I click the undelete button or I ask the mediators to undelete it. I am not sure why the undelete button is there. (It seems like kind of a rub the jar with the genie trap.) I have no idea what that link does, but is very curious.

What is the benefit of undeleting the hidden question on my side or even asking the mediators to?

I work on it little by little since I have thankfully much higher reputation on other sites, so my effort on this site has much less reward (quite literally). But the question itself is important for me, also so I can print it out cleanly to reference. So I do return to it every so often to update, hoping that the draft will one day be clean enough that I am happy enough with it to ask the moderators to open it again.

Questions:

1. Is it really a big deal to ask the moderators to change the status from deleted to hidden once more, to make it easier to reference to modify until it is polished enough to request it be opened?
2. Why would it be in the interest of the community to permanently delete something that is still in the process of being polished if the author clicks the undelete button?
3. What does the "undelete button" actually do?

Thank you for your guidance.

Answer 1

I'm guessing that you're referring to this question, which you've edited about thirty times, including twice after it was deleted a month ago.

I have to point out that your post is not really a good fit for our question-and-answer format. It looks much more like a draft of a paper than it does like a question. If what you want is to work on it incrementally, you should use some other platform. There are tons of LaTeX-friendly editors out there, both running locally on your computer and running on some website. If you particularly like Stack Exchange's combination of Markdown and MathJax, you might try https://stackedit.io.

1. Is it really a big deal to ask the moderators to change the status from deleted to hidden once more, to make it easier to reference to modify until it is polished enough to request it be opened?

There's not really a difference on this platform between "deleted" and "hidden." I think you mean "closed." But the question is still closed.

It is very unusual for a closed question to be subject to months of revision and then re-opened. Most users get their questions into a workable state before they ask them, and make only a few modifications after the question has been asked.

I personally would not use my moderator superpower to undelete and reopen your question, and I don't expect your question would survive the reopen queue. A more focused question would have a better chance.

2. Why would it be in the interest of the community to permanently delete something that is still in the process of being polished if the author clicks the undelete button?

That's just different from the way that other folks in the community interact with the site. Get your question into a state that you are comfortable with, then ask it.

3. What does the "undelete button" actually do?

The undelete button casts an "undelete vote." Deleted questions which receive a certain number of undelete votes from ordinary users become visible to everyone again. I think that number is three, just like for "delete votes," "close votes," and "reopen votes."

If you click the undelete button, it'll say "Undelete (1)," until either someone else votes to undelete or your vote ages away.