This proposal requires technical changes to the MediaWiki software.

1. Each version of a page has a score

1. Everybody can vote on their opinion of the version of a page from 0 to 10, with 0 being "this version is completely unreliable and inappropriate" and 10 being "this version is perfect", on a "vote" button, in the "history" tab
2. People can remove their votes from versions at any time
3. The version with the highest average score will be displayed on a new tab marked "presentation" as in "presentation version"
4. The "presentation" tab will be the one displayed to people who first reach the page via a link or search, wheras the latest version (currently the version displayed to ordinary readers) will be displayed on a seperate tab marked "latest"
5. The "history" section will have a function to present the history ordered by score, so that you can pick from other highly rated versions, or the currently highest rated version, rather than edit the latest, which may be vandalised
6. Articles with an average score of less than 3 on all versions will appear as redlinks, and instead of the "presentation" version will display something like "This article exists but has been considered to not be worth keeping".
7. newer versions of articles will start off with a score of zero
8. To prevent edit conflicts, viewing version X and clicking the "edit this section/page" link will always edit version X - editing the latest version is no longer quite so important

This way

1. vandalism isn't so significant as it won't be rated highly by other editors, so will never be the "presentation" version - people only need to worry about it when they edit the page, and they can always just pick a better version
2. articles don't need deletion - articles where all versions have an average score of less than 3 (i.e. less than 30% support) won't count, and people can vote on a version if they think it should or shouldn't be deleted.
3. this should reduce revert wars, as they won't make a blind bit of difference to the "presentation" version, and people don't even need to see the latest version when editing.
4. edits can be made to the "presentation" version as well as to the "current" version
5. the "presentation" version will remain the "presentation" version, until the majority has decided that there is a better one
6. this will happen automatically
7. readers get to have an influence even without editing.

Obviously, something will need to be done about sockpuppets, so

1. every person's vote will be modified (multiplied) by a factor assigned to them
2. the factor assigned to an editor shall be directly related, in some manner, to the average score over all article of the versions that they have created
3. people cannot vote on versions that they have created (to prevent people assigning all their versions 10 and then gaining the best factor, thus being able to keep their versions at 10)

This may have some techical issues due to speed of processing the votes and which version has the best score - so it may only update the "presentation" version every hour or day or something, rather than instantly.

The issue of how to deal with re-directs and moves under this system is one that will need solving.

Please use the talk page. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 23:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]