Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:37:59 UTC
By default a wiki page's most recent revision is shown to the visitor. This can be subject to vandalism. We can provide a "Most Recent / Most Stable" switch on the user interface to provide an alternative view that shows the most "stable" revision. Here I suggest an easy and effective way to determine the most stable revision: Given a period ("the past three months" by default, but changeable by the user), find out which revision in this period lasts longest before it is succeeded by the next revision. Show this revision if the user is viewing the "Most Stable" view of the wiki page.
One should use the FlaggedRevs extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs which is enabled on http://www.mediawiki.org/ That is exactly what you are describing. Edits are not shown to the general public until someone mark some version of the article has "stable". It is then used as a default. Such a feature can be enabled on any Wikimedia wiki provided the community on that wiki agrees on enabling that extension :-]
That is a manual approach to determining whether a revision is "stable". The approach I suggested is automatic, and I think is more suitable for large-scale wiki projects such as Wikipedia and Wikisource. (In reply to comment #1) > One should use the FlaggedRevs extension > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs which is enabled on > http://www.mediawiki.org/ > > That is exactly what you are describing. Edits are not shown to the general > public until someone mark some version of the article has "stable". It is > then > used as a default. > > > Such a feature can be enabled on any Wikimedia wiki provided the community on > that wiki agrees on enabling that extension :-]
I see what you mean now. I am moving this to the FlaggedRev component as a feature request.
Hi Antoine, Thank you for moving this to FlaggedRev. However, I want to make a note that the now title "automatic page approval after some time" doesn't really reflect my initial idea. My initial idea says, the most stable revision is the revision that has the longest time span between its creation and its next revision's creation. For example, if a wiki page has 5 revisions during the past 3 months: 2003-02-20 2003-02-01 2003-01-01 2002-12-31 2001-12-01 Then we consider "2003-01-01" is the most stable revision because it took 31 days for the next revision (2003-02-01) to happen, and 31 days is the longest among all time differences between these revisions.
Sorry, the example should be: 2003-02-20 2003-02-01 2003-01-01 2002-12-31 2002-12-01
This should not be part of FlaggedRevs (maybe another extension).
