I want to thank everyone for providing insightful comments to this diffcult topic. I’m personally for an anonymization option, and I think I currently fall on making anonymized IDs not active side, for much of the same reasons @spiphany has laid out. But there needs to be a lot of thought put into what ever is implemented.
FWIW, Wikipedia has a Wikibreak enforcer, for people who feel like they need to take a break but also want a way to keep them off of Wikipedia for the intented period. That might be an interesting option as well.
Not an engineer, but @-mentions are not recorded in an specific way. A notification is generated, but after that it’s just a piece of text that the site/apps interpret in a robotic way - making a link out of the text and linking it to /users/[username]. If anonymization included @-mentions, I suspect there would have to be some sort of find and replace script, which would probably be super inefficient.
To be clear, it’s our developers who do this, I’m just the person who relays the request. Bringing back an account is way beyond my technical capabilities.
The only time this is really feasible is before the previous week’s backup from our test server is replaced, which happens every Saturday, US time. For example if an account is deleted on Friday and we don’t get the request to resurrect it until the following Monday, it’s too late - the backup that had their easily-accessible information is gone.