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Pending edits

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This is a simple and modest proposal for not improving quality in Wikipedia, but which aims mainly at preventing too many revert wars.

This issue is more generally discussed in w:wikipedia:Wikipedia approval mechanism with a number of other proposals some along the same broad lines.

The article structure was modellen on example of Editing referees.

What this proposal addresses

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  • The anonymous users edits
  • revert wars
  • forcing people to talk on talk pages
  • content filtering
  • NPOV promotion

What this proposal does not address

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  • The quality of the article
  • Aiding in "making final versions" of article.

How the mechanism would work

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Any edit to the wikipedia would be delayed by fixed amount of time. Reader would be presented with current version of article and summary of pending edits, as diffs to current version.

The edit could be vetoed. If the edit is vetoed, it is abandoned. No scoring would be implemented whatsoever. If the article would not be vetoed, then it is "silently" approved.

No revert wars. One person can veto any edit. Simple, though with drawbacks No special privileges (any special prigivleges are bad thing)

What are drawbacks of this approach

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  • One troll could prevent the any progress on the article.
Solution: "ban from the article" mechanism, and only registered users would have "veto edit" option
Ban from article could be implemented as scoring mechanism. Registered users would want to "ban someone", and if enough such people would vote for it (say 2/3 of votes), the person could be banned from editing article after some fixed time, but not from discussion on talk page. THe person should be noticed about who wanted to ban him. Ban could be revoked by administrators, but not banned by administrators (they should be only for corrections of flaws of system).
  • Merging of the edits
Allowing only one edit would be terrible thing, so there probably would be a lot of edits. How to merge them in some cases would be difficult.
Actually, i believe this could be a good thing, since it would force people to talk on talk pages so to choose only one edit to pass and veto others.
  • There would be needed changes to ways wikipedia works