Ray Saintonge wrote
Simply marking an article as "ready for print" would effectively freeze it from further editing. The living Wikipedia article needs to be continually editable so that the version that is on the 2nd printed edition can show further improvements.
Agree. The threads on this issue are already a little tangled. I agree wholeheartedly with comments about the copyediting being key.
Invisible HTML comments could be used to insert standard messages such as 'above here is written in news style as a candidate short print article', without much inhibiting further editing. Presumably anyone who cared enough to put an article forward by adding this comment would watch edits to those pages. Perhaps that and another possible , less specific, message: 'this page is currently being considered for the print WP'.
Charles