Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions

This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

Please note that this page is in its very early stages with many issues still under discussion, so please be very bold in improving it. Also, if you fear this will mean the end of Wikipedia's traditional concept of immediate editing, please read this statement by Erik Möller.

This page in a nutshell: The proposal is for the introduction of a system whereby articles are sighted that they are free from vandalism. The approved versions are known as Sighted versions.

As part of a Request for Comment on pending-changes protection, a third phase considered its use in the short term. In accordance with consensus it was removed from all articles on Friday, 20 May 2011, with no prejudice against future reinstatement, in some form, based upon consensus and discussion. See also: Final comments by the closing administrator

This proposal is for the introduction of a system whereby users who are not logged in may be presented with a different version of an article than users who are. Articles are validated that they are presentable and free from vandalism. The approved versions are known as Sighted versions. All logged-in users will continue to see and edit the most recent version of a page. Users who are not logged in will initially see the most recent sighted version, if there is one. If no version is sighted, they see the most recent one, as happens now. Users looking at a sighted version can still choose to view the most recent version and edit it.

Discussions about sighting have been going on for some time. See m:Reviewed_article_version (2004), Wikipedia:Why stable versions, Wikipedia:Stable versions, and Wikipedia:Static version. The document Wikipedia:Pushing to validation summarizes the discussion at Wikimania 2006 about the wish to validate articles. The vision is ambitious: to make Wikipedia a credible source of information, and requires that we shift our focus from quantity to quality.^[1] These proposals are modest beginnings towards that goal.

Sighted revisions mark at least a light indication of quality (or at least freedom from vandalism), meaning at least one trusted editor (reviewer) has confirmed that the article is presentable to the wider public. This proposal puts a more positive spin on the accepting and reverting of changes than what we are already doing.^[2] This change will make the wider public aware of how much effort we put into quality assurance^[3].