Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
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.
a) This actually ties in with our previous discussions on this list about a review process to sift out articles for Wikipedia 1.0.
b) There must be a way to do this within the Wiki process, rather than bringing in an editorial committee by another name. I would suggest we start with the review process wide open and only narrow it as needed.
I'm not saying the Wiki process must be a magical way to get brilliance. What I do think is that a reviewing process that lets the wiki do the work is much more likely to work well within the project and get buy-in from the editors.
Obvious problems spring to mind, e.g. vote spamming. (Imagine weblogs telling people to come and vote for THIS version of [[George W. Bush]] or [[John Kerry]] or [[Azerbaijan]] or [[Linux]].) But, keeping possible problems in mind, I suspect it would be better to *let the problems happen*, then do things to solve them *if* they really turn out that bad.
Magnus implemented a review voting procedure on test.wikipedia.org, if people want to see how such a thing might look to an editor. He calls it 'validate', but we can work out a suitable name as needed:
http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=validate%C3...
Mind you, there's a lot to be said for Andrew Lih's words:
Why not have milestones done the usual wiki way? Try consensus first, then do voting. No fancy mechanisms or sysop only policies.
- d.