As far as quality control is concerned, I'd love to see something akin to a "published page" tab and "revised" or "draft" page that could be edited, with some sort of admin-type tool that could be used to select a specific version of the page edits to be noted as the "published page" that could be used by casual readers to the wiki. The decision for what page would actually be selected is something to be decided by the participants of that page. I don't believe this would take too much additional programming in terms of adding the extension to MediaWiki, and it would only require the creation of one additional and smallish table to keep track of: what the current "published version" of the page is at the moment. It might even help with caching issues as the published version would be the one to cache, not necessarily the one with the latest edit. Just a thought here, and something on my personal wish list of future Wiki tools I'd love to see.
just fyi, you may want to look at FLOSS Manuals (http://www.flossmanuals.net)
we have exactly this structure so maybe browse around it and see if this is the kind of idea that you like.
there are published pages: http://www.flossmanuals.net/read
and the 'backend' where manuals are written: http://www.flossmanuals.net/write
the 'published' pages are static, and the backend holds pages that can be dynamically edited.
the PDFs that are linked from the 'published' pages are also static
adam
-- Robert Horning
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