User:Antaeus Feldspar/ApprovalWiki

To start: I am not suggesting that the wiki design I am about to propose should or must replace the current conventional wiki design used by Wikipedia. However, observations of how the current design works and sometimes fails to work has inspired an idea for a new design, the ApprovalWiki.

The ApprovalWiki differs from the standard wiki design in how it determines the "default content" of the page. The standard wiki design has a built-in policy that the last saved version of the page will be the version seen by all successive visitors, until a new version is saved over it. This enables vandalism and revert wars, and though measures exist to deal with both, they remain a nuisance and a problem.

The ApprovalWiki, on the other hand, solicits votes from its editors. Each editor is asked, for each version of the page, whether they Approve, Disapprove, or are Neutral on it. Each editor can also designate a single version of the page as their Preferred version; i.e., the one they think is the best so far. The ApprovalWiki then selects its default page version to present based on which page has received the highest percentage of Approve votes and Preferred votes.

• A *huge* problem like this would be that vandals would form leagues in where 4 random vandals would each edit a page before vandalising it, thereby getting a significant vote base for most articles (with average of 10 edits). Doing this once, they could effectively hostily takeover vast sections of a particular subject to a point that administrators would have to fix the mess. — HopeSeekr of xMule (Talk) 18:13, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
  • This is true, that vandals would band together and try to outvote the good editors to make a vandalized version to be the default. But I view this as an improvement over the current system, where all a vandal or a POV-pusher needs to do to make a vandalized version the default is just to sneak in at an unguarded moment. -- Antaeus Feldspar 23:30, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
• I believe Jimbo walles states that within some months this year the wikipedia 1.0 version will be published ,rendering wikipedia's articles a more stable form ,and rechecking the article(voting on it..) once a year or so.

The Procrastinator 01:27, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

• Seems like you would often run into the problem that by the time you garnered enough votes for one version, another version would already be vieing for votes. Especially on articles that changed frequently, like Current Events. -- Yeago 02:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)