A new variant on an old idea follows.

I propose a new variant on protection of pages, a sort of "deferred edits" solution, to be used on high-traffic vandalism targets a la George W Bush and other presidential candidates.

Someone vandalizes GWB. Someone reverts the vandalism, say, sixty seconds to three or four minutes later. (Hey, the wiki is danged slow sometime.) The vandalism is gone. In those sixty seconds, however, someone may have viewed the page.

My solution would be a feature that would defer any edits for a short period of time, say, five minutes. If the revision remains unchanged (unedited, unreverted, un-rolledback) for those five minutes, it becomes the currently displayed 'article'. This should provide an adequate window during which such vandalism can be reverted, without it ever being displayed.

This differs from other schemes, which typically suggest some sort of administrative approval method for new revisions (such schemes perform poorly if an administrator is not available) or some sort of 'implicit review' schemes where, if a sufficiently qualified user views a page, it is marked as 'all right'.

The handling of the page 'future' (the opposite of its history) may be a trifle tricky, but I imagine it would not be intractible. A notice might be placed at the top of the article near the toolbar-tabs, "A new version of this article is pending" and a new tab for "pending version" or some equivalent label could be made available. General page edits should be directed to the pending version, and when the page is saved the user would be taken to the "pending version" tab (so they can be assured that their changes go through, preventing multiple submissions). The pending version may bear a timestamp indicating when it will be made available. The 'future revisions' could be also be displayed in the History tab above the current (boldly hilighted in some manner) revision. Finally, we might even put a notice in the Edit window: "Is this version of the page vandalized? You can start editing from [page history link here|another revision]."

In the event that a 'bad' version makes it to the current article, there ought to be a special administrator-type button or link to immediately promote the future-revisions to the presently displayed article (rather than being forced to wait for five or more minutes to elapse with the article unchanged).

I think a good, simple, short "window" scheme of this sort, if applied to selected high-profile high-traffic pages (such as featured articles or pages linked to from Slashdot or the like) would be much more readily understandable and provide a reasonable alternative to gross page protection. It might also take a lot of the fun out of vandalism if you know that your changes probably won't ever be seen by the general article-viewing public.

I do not advocate deployment of such a scheme wiki-wide at this time.