Let me clarify how I understand Peter's proposal. At least, the way I've described it here, it's one I
might want to get behind. It is certainly better than relegating editable versions to a /draft subpage.
(1) In the content development space, an installation of MediaWiki allows work to proceed more or less the way it does on Wikipedia; i.e., there are no frozen pages, and everything is dynamically editable.
(2) Some feature of the software allows editors to bless certain versions.
(3) All of and only the most recent blessed content appears in a separate web of pages. This, then, works as follows: the
approved of an article appears just as
that version of the article does in the development space, except: if an article has links to X, Y, and Z, and approved versions of only X and Y exist, then the "blessed articles" web version of the article links only to X and Y; there is no "red link" to Z, and no link to a version-in-progress of Z. (We can invite readers to look at the most recent development version of the article to view links to not-yet-approved articles.)
Actually, this is quite similar to the system I helped plan out for the Encyclopedia of Earth. The difference is that we do not use any sort of "draft" namespace, as EoE does (well, that wasn't my doing
), but instead simply use metadata (of
some sort: be creative) to mark the approved articles. I can imagine that, in the development space, on those articles that have some approved version, contributors would see at the top of the article: "An approved version of this article exists. _View_differences_." This helps keep the development area simple and easy to work in--which is very important.
