The current software maintains a history list for each article. I
think at the moment all revisions are kept permanently; at various
points in the past very old versions were archived off somwhere (and
this will likely happen in the future as well. The current article
and each revision maintains information on who made the edit when.
I propose adding a few fields to the description of each revision:
these fields are "approval" fields of various types.
Wikipedia "editors" will have access to a form with checkboxes where
they can indicate "I believe the content of this article is correct
and complete", "I believe the text of this article is well-written",
etc. These flags are maintained with the _revision_ to which they
were applied. In the history list of each article, they appear as
flags as well, so users and administrators can look at the history
list to see which revisions have been approved for what reason.
Article revisions with _any_ approval flags set will not be archived,
but always kept in active history. Articles with _all_ approval
flags set will be specially treated as "complete" for use in
collections and such.
At some later point (if at all) we may add features to allow users to
view "lastest approved" instead of "latest" by default, but that
won't be useful until a large number of articles have approvals. At
any rate, we can start collecting the information now and figure out
how to use it later.
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