Hi List,
Délphine told me that the news about stable versions has led to discussions in several projects. As the discussion on the germanlanguage Wikipedia are, well, in german, here is some short information in english about all this.
When Jimbo visited Germany in June, me and other members of the german community approached him about stable versions. After some discussion, he decided that it would be good to finally start with stable versions and, as this is a very fundamental change, to use one project as a testing ground before starting this everywhere. As you know, we are the lucky ones ;-)
A few parameters were agreed upon, namely that it should be kept simple, in particular that what version is marked and what is not, should not be the result of some voting process and that we need to seperate two issues of stable versions: fighting vandalism and controlling the factual accuracy. Thus, a concept was then worked out, based on the discussions on meta, en and de and Brion was assigned with implementing it, which he is still busy with and it will still be some months before this actually goes life.
A first decision was not to call this stable versions, as this is a term where everybody understands something different. Therefore, the following are the concepts:
i) Unvandalized versions (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen). An unvandalized version is a version of an article that has not been vandalized. The right to flag a version like this is given to accounts by an automatic process, based on the number of edits and the time passed since account creation. We will start the test with 30 edits/30 days. Versions can be flagged similar to the small changes mark with some features to make life easy, like automatic marking of articles newly created by users with this right.
ii) Reviewed versions (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gepr%C3%BCfte_Versionen). The meaning of this version is that the article contains no factual errors and that there are no misleading omissions, while not requiring any other form of completeness. The right to flag an article like this is given by a bureaucrat. This flag can also be removed again and the same version may be flagged by multiple users. We agree that the reviewers should come from an active portal in the wikipedia. The discussion on qualifications from within the wikipedia respectively from outside the wikipedia is going on. The notion of outside experts is also discussed.
iii) Who sees what? Nothing is changed for logged in users. IPs see the latest reviewed or unvandalized versions, meaning that the reviewed version has no priority over an unvandalized version. If the version the IP sees is not the current one, a warning is shown with links to the current version. If no version of the article was ever flagged, a warning is shown. Note that this point is subject to MediaWiki settings, meaning that if in your project/wiki, this sounds like a contraproductive idea, you can turn it off, which is important for example in young wikipedias.
Sincerely yours,
de:P. Birken