Editing Encyclopedia:Historical archive/Policy/Approval mechanism (section)

===Andrew A's proposal===

See [[m:Referees]]. This proposal is consistent with much of the above.

Main features:

*No impact on the existing way of doing things other than appearance of extra links on some article pages, saying that this article has been reviewed and linking to details.

*All articles remain in the main namespace. The only new namespace is a special one used to keep track of who has reviewed what.

*All reviews relate to a specific version. As any update to the article creates a new version, this initially has no reviewed status at all (with some possible exceptions where there is no need to maintain independence between contributor and reviewer and the software might therefore flag the approval by default). The concepts of freezing articles or promoting them in a configuration management system are not needed.

*All reviews are simply check boxes or radio buttons. Discussion remains on existing talk pages.

*QA on the main Wikipedia is supplied by three levels of reviewer:
**A basic level which we initially give to anyone who asks for it,
**A specialist level at which the reviewer claims expertise on the subject of the article,
**A referee level at which the reviewer claims to be a quotable authority on the subject of the article.

*At the referee level only, the reviewer is expected to be independent of the article author(s). At other levels, reviewers are encouraged to edit and refactor as necessary, but not to review articles which are primarily their own work.

*At all levels, collegiate responsibility is the system, identical to the existing Wikipedia. There is no attempt to formally identify areas of expertise. Other members at this level are expected to comment if a particular reviewer is performing badly, and particularly if they are venturing outside their areas of expertise at the higher levels.

*At all levels, all reviewers are expected to approve only articles that they consider of high quality.

*All three levels allow for dissent from the approval of others.

*The same software (with extensions) can support
**Wikipedia 1.0,
**A G-rated Wikipedia,
**Specialist encyclopedias.

*Readers of Wikipedia must be offered user-friendly ways of restricting what they see to their desired level of review and (hopefully) reliability. These might include
**User options,
**URL aliases (e.g. www.family.en.wikipedia.org, www.refereed.en.wikipedia.org).