At 09:33 PM 2/6/2005 -0500, Deathphoenix wrote:
I've only been on the mailing list a short time, but it's sure opening my eyes to the community and its concerns.
What you're talking about is a type of "moderated articlespace". That could work, and in fact, would be a great idea with a proper system. You'd probably need to have a small team of volunteers willing to act as moderators for each article (of course, people would be moderating much more than a single "protected article"). The current {{protected}} system is good for protecting the article so that only admins can edit it, so if the moderators were admins, that would work. But I don't know how much work that would add for the admins. Perhaps moderators should be granted limited "admin" access to the moderated articles they are working on so they can edit the protected article according to the Talk pages.
I've always been a fan of the approach of marking particular revisions of an article as "confirmed good", with "confirmed" being whatever system we come up with for making such decisions (editorial board, voting, whatever). Then we can have a link on each page to "view most recent confirmed version" that will jump you back to that particular version in the article's history. This way the working version of the article remains the "primary" one, and there's no risk of forks developing because the confirmed version is by definition a static historical thing, but we can say to people who question the quality of Wikipedia that now there's a way to make sure they aren't reading nonsense that was put in by vandals minutes (or months) earlier.