On 10/9/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
One thing I've seen suggested is making anons always see the most recent revision on articles they have recently edited (a session length cookie could be used for tracking that).
Usability wise that seems tricky. Imagine making an edit, then passing the link on, only to find that both viewers see different things. Also, one benefit of having a different default view is to disincentivize vandalism -- if the user mistakenly _believes_ their edit has taken effect, vandalism is not disincentivized.
Perhaps it is solvable with reasonably clear UI messages. But I'm not sure a simple "Your edit has been submitted and will be shown to all readers pending review" message isn't sufficient.
But at the end we don't need to worry about the worries: Instead we can simply use objective measurements. If we turn on users defaulting to the flagged revisions on ten thousand well distributed articles, we can then track the performance.
It would probably be least controversial to immediately do it on all articles that are currently semi-protected. Can you quickly get the number of those?
It would be slightly more controversial to do on the featured & good articles.