New subject: [Wikipedia-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

30 Aug 2006

This is in response to the somewhat silly English-language press we've
had lately. I'll be sending copies of this out to the sources of
recent articles on the subject that got it precisely backwards.

The following is, I understand, technically accurate, based on text
from Amgine, Phillipp Birkin (de:wp), Jimbo and Mathias Schindler (I
think), and comcom discussions (press relations being part of that
job). Corrections welcomed - you have about five minutes.

(and geni, I expect you to ask how this makes the new patrollers' jobs
easier - by having what's effectively a feed of new-editor and
anonymous edits, is what I was thinking of.)

- d.

"Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

* What is changing?

We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.

We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where
all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of
articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked
from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20
website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August
2006 - http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the
readers.

The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors
will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a
'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The
idea is to enhance the *reading* experience, and free us to enhance
the *editing* experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general
public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.

Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in
editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many
concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and
vandalism - this will assist their work and we do not expect new
delays.

We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions
of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a
high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the
German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has
already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have
sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other
language Wikipedias.

These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail
as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow
us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the
front page itself to full unrestricted editing.

* When was this proposed?

Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late
2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a
very high-quality article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake) very
quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed
how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost
the start of the project, in 2001.