Hi Ulrich!
As it is planned, the feature is simply too intrusive.
Once an article
is flagged as "sighted", there is no way back. It effectively forces the
community to keep on flagging, because otherwise a years-old version,
that may even have been flagged erroneously, would be shown to anonymous
readers instead of the current one.
If it ever takes more then 10 minutes to flag an article as "sighted" we
have a problem. And that would not be a problem of the sighted version
feature, it would be a problem of us not having enough people patrolling
the recent changes. A lag of edits to be sighted would just be the symptom.
But I am very optimistic that there won't be any serious backlog. We
have several very dedicated vandal fighters, they are the backbone of
our quality control system. The sighted version feature enables them to
do their work much more efficiently (no patroller needs to check an edit
another person has already checked; no edits get overlooked). This might
even motivate more people to engage in RC patrol because it shows them
what still needs to be checked.
Kurt