Salvatore Ingala:
Hi, I'm a newcomer to the developers group. I uploaded in the branch SHOW_VERIFIED a modified version of MediaWiki where I added a new feature. This wants to be an alternative to the page protection. I added a verify/unverify button: 'verify' sets the current revision (or the one indexed by oldid) as the verified one for that page. This means that any user can edit the page, but the new revisions are not shown (though they can be accessed through the hystory, where the currently 'verified' revision is shown in bold characters) until a sysop 'verifies' it again. 'unverify', of course, removes this protection.
This is a step in the right direction. Something similar has been discussed for a while, with an additional element: The live version of the page is replaced *automatically* with the temporary version after a set period of time without edits. In combination with 3RR, this could lead to an open, consensus-based approach to updating contentious pages. This idea is described in http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?StableCopy and linked pages and has been tossed around a few times as a way to get rid of protected pages. See also this thread from January 2003: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-January/026211.html
Your current implementation has the drawback that it might become very popular soon, even on pages where we otherwise try to avoid protection, and give sysops too much editorial responsibility. Of course, it can hardly get worse than it is now, where some articles, such as http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexueller_Missbrauch_von_Kindern have been protected for months (that one since April!).
Best,
Erik