One problem I've noticed is that so many anons are editing that entire pages of edit histories consist of anon edits. Many are fine, some superb, but some are dodgy. In the past, with a smaller database of articles we could pretty much guarantee that most if not all would be checked by others and errors corrected. But all too often things don't seem to be being checked.
The problem for users who see a long list of anon edits is that they don't know if they are perfectly OK edits that have been looked at by others and not thought to need correction (hence the absence of usernic edits) or if they simply have never been checked. All too often, faced with a massive list of anon edits, the approach of people (myself included) has been to look at a sample edit and see if it was a good edit or a vandalistic edit. If it was good, then we presume they were a serious contributor don't look at each edit. While reading the up-to-date article is all very well, the problem is that some perfectly valid content may well have been deleted somewhere along the line. But unless we check each edit, or go back to sample pages we don't know if something valid was dumped by someone at some stage and not noticed when a genuine user came in directly afterwards and made a good edit of the surviving test.
What WP needs is some way to ensure that users can tell if anon edits were checked. That way we can spot those that weren't and not have people duplicating checks on good anon edits. Perhaps the page history should include a review box that could be ticked by a named user to indicate that they checked the text at that point. It doesn't have to mean a formal approval of the text, merely to let people know that someone had looked at it.
I know there are users I from experience trust implicitly. I know the quality of their work. Seeing that say John Kenney had glanced over an edit on a royal biographical page would be enough for me to know, going by his ability, that I don't have to recheck. Similarly a review of a page had been looked over by Izehar, Michael Hardy, Mav or tons of others means I don't have to spend ages checking things.
Right now, because we don't know who has checked what stuff some stuff is being checked to death, while other articles are not being checked at all. It would be a big help if we could spot the checked and unchecked articles and so focus our attentions on those that need a check.
Thom
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