John Lee wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
It would be good if we could put users on probation. Occasionally I've taken the effort to track a vandal, watching and reverting their edits. But it would be nice to be able to say "this user's next edit is 90% likely to be vandalism, hence, let's screen it *before* it goes live". All the edits of probationary users could appear on one screen, and people watching that list could pick out the occasional good ones to let through, much like moderating a mailing list.
This is something of a perennial proposal. The main problem I see with it is the potential for edit conflicts - if a valid edit goes through between when the probationary edit is made, and when it is approved, there might be trouble merging the two edits together.
The technical side could actually be handled rather easily: all we need is a way to tag a specific revision as the visible one. If the visible version isn't the latest, and someone tries to edit it, they get the same (or similar) warning as when editing an old revision in general.
"You are editing the stable version of this page. If you save it, any unreviewed changes made since this version will be removed."
(In fact, it might be possible to use the existing page_latest column for this, though I haven't really checked.)