To give maximum choice, I have just written a new MediaWiki extension which allows for *one* revision of an article to be declared "stable".
A select group of users can declare an article version as "stable". In the default setup, the "select group" is everyone, but that would have to be tightly restricted in an live setup. For this purpose, I propose the creation of a new user group, like buerocrats and sysops, called "prozacs" - after all, they are supposed to stabelize the wiki ;-)
My implementation supports only one stable version per article. If a new stable version is selected, the information about the "last" stable version is removed. The advantage is that this setup works without any additional database reads (of course it still has to write information on setting a new stable version).
Setting a version as stable is currently not logged; this isn't a technical problem, but sheer lazyness on my part.
There is a problem with templates; even a stable version will use new templates. I do not have a neat soultion for that, except generally limiting write access to templates. However, misinformation through a template will be hard to achieve anyway, compared to directly editing article; also, template changes will be noticed rather quickly.
This complements the validation feature and the external "import-wiki". Now all the community has to do is chose. Simple, eh? ;-)
Tech stuff: * CVS, module "extensions", file "StableVersion.php" (note the database change described at the beginning of the file) * requires latest MediaWiki from CVS (because of hooks) * does not log "stable version setting" (yet)
Magnus