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