Is there a way to recover one's Wikipedia contributions?

Question

Some ten years ago, I've created about a dozen of wikipedia articles, especially on the Russian Wikipedia.

Years went by, and almost all of them got deleted, for completely ridiculous reasons, and very often without adequate notifications to any field experts, or sometimes outright against the consensus of the community and in the presence of reputable sources, which is the primary reason I completely abandoned wasting any more time on those people.

Many of the articles I've created from scratch; some did contain original research (e.g., against the official policies of Wikipedia, but a good source for my own site); none included any copyvio or personal information; all were done from a registered account; is there any way to recover all such edits?

Additionally, is there any way to preserve years-old articles that are yet to be removed?

Answer 1

The English Wikipedia has a policy called WP:REFUND in which users can request that the content of some deleted articles be restored and moved to their userspace/sandbox so that they can continue work. (See the page's directions, which will change over time.) In these cases, mind that the admin will want to know that you're aware of the notability criteria and will not move the text back into public view unless the criteria are met.

The Russian Wikipedia has a similar page where you can make a request. Again, be mindful of the local policies.

If you do not recall the specific article names, all actions on Wikipedia are logged so if you're not able to view page creations by your old username, an admin on the local Wikipedia will be able to check upon request.

In recent years, there are bots that scrape articles nominated for deletion to preserve the content in other wikis. Alternatively, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has frequent readable backups as well, but they won't be in wiki markup.