User:JWSchmidt/Blog/17 March 2007

Stable versions  Anyone who has spent time dealing with vandalism has probably thought about ways to limit vandalism and ways to help detect vandalism. One recent helpful innovation is the change to the recent changes tool that shows the number of characters added or removed by each edit. Last summer Jimmy Wales wrote about plans for "version flagging", a proposed new wiki editing process in which there would be a distinction between wiki page versions shown to the public and the newest page versions produced by some editors. The idea being to let everyone edit the wiki pages, but allow the community to review some edits before the edits go public. "Some editors" in this case means wiki editors who do not register a user name or editors who only recently created their user account.

Rumor had it that the German Wikipedia would be the first to test some kind of system for allowing edits to protected articles, review of those edits, and approval of the edits by long-term registered users (here "long-term" means about four days). This system was to apply to the relatively few articles that are protected or semi-protected. This blog post marks the start of my attempt to find out if anything has or will come of this proposal.

The Wikipedia Signpost of 20 March 2007 reported that a contractor was hired to work on "stable versions". The project seems to be moving towards a system where people browsing Wikipedia will be able to request that they see only only reviewed versions of pages.

April 28: With a bit of luck, it can undergo the review process and perhaps be tested on a Wikipedia soon - Rob Church (blog)