[Mediawiki-l] adding a [draft] tab

Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon at USPTO.GOV
Thu Dec 27 12:26:50 UTC 2007


I saw a wiki once with a [draft] tab between [article] and [discussion]
- yet, having browsed thousands of web pages and hundreds of wikis each
week, I can't remember where I saw it, oh so long ago (maybe even only
DAYS ago, oh my!).  Does anyone know of an example Mediawiki
installation with an additional [draft] tab?  Thanks!

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Additional background, for those interested in such a thing, and why:  

We want it all!  Who doesn't?  ;-)

We want to lock the [article] pages to be the authored / approved
resource of our "encyclopedia" reference, and keep it 100% accurate and
searchable as a research resource.  We will update these via admin
rights when changes and new versions are vetted out and approved (union,
lawyers, and so on).

We still want to invite visitors to make recommendations, to do their
own rewrites, to dialog with each other, to share and evolve their edits
together, and so on, letting them tell us "we'd prefer it THIS way" as a
copy of any [article] page that they think can and should be made
better.

The [discussion] page can be used for this, but ... like Wikipedia, the
discussion pages kind of have their own flow, and I can see a reason to
clearly separate proposed edits from chat.  So, if we use the current
[discussion] pages only for the edits and the chat, then it gets messy
and uninviting for people with different purposes to clearly know where
to read.  We'd prefer: edits go here ([draft]), chats go here
([discussion]).

In our wiki installation, our own goal is to have such a [draft] page
start out as an exact copy of the main [article] page.  Is there a
MySQL/PHPMyAdmin way to simply build a copy of the current version
[article] table(?) and call it a new [draft] table so that the [draft]
pages start out as 100% exact copies of the current [article] page?  We
do not need the [article] history - only the current "front [article]
page".

We want to make it clear that the [article] page is the approved
reference (locked, only for admins to update) and that [draft] is the
playpen / sandbox where visitors are to put their edits, their requests
for how they think the next publication of the [article] should look.  

Thanks for any pointers to a wiki with an additional [draft] page
implementation. 

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