How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
c) When a page with milestone(s) on it was displayed, _you would still see and edit the latest version,_ but a not-too-conspicuous indicator would appear to show that there was a milestone and clicking on it would display the milestone.
d) NPOV and such notices could contain a suggestion that you might want to read the latest milestone.
This would change the current situation minimally--newcomers would still see and edit the latest page regardless of whether there were "milestones." In situations where there was a serious "months-after" effect, it would be easy to revert to the last milestone and then hash things out via the usual edit wars... I can imagine a "Votes for Reversion to Milestone" conference.
In other words, once a milestone is marked, don't lock it or obviously prefer it--just make it available.
The assumption is that in the vast majority of cases, once a milestone is reached, further edits would still be progressive improvements.
In other words, just provide a way of putting bookmarks into the existing "history" file and a tab which, instead of bringing up the whole history, brings up the latest milestone.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/