 | This Wikipedia page has been superseded by Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions and is retained primarily for historical reference. |
Confirmed revisions are a proposed type of flagged revisions used to deal with edit wars, disputed and contentious articles, and also as a backup for sighted revisions (used to deal with vandalism principally) when they cause problems on an article.
A revision should be confirmed when the changes with the latest confirmed revision are non-controversial, not related to the dispute, or consensual. Regardless of the user rights, edits are never automatically confirmed, and a user should not have edited an article between the latest confirmed version and the edit to confirm (if possible, this may be technically enforced).
Users able to confirm revisions may be called 'moderators' and chosen in a light process, sysops (moderators by default) would have the ability to configure an article so that the latest confirmed version is the one displayed to IPs. The main advantage to full protection is that it allows article development, while full protection makes it difficult, and could be applied to a wider class of articles or for longer periods.
The reasons sighted revisions cannot be used for this purpose and another type of flagged revisions is needed follow. If we want to apply sighted revisions to a large class of articles, the group of surveyors will have to be bigger and bigger. It will create several problems that confirmed revisions can solve:
- Sight wars will frequently occur on contentious articles.
- Vandals will be granted the surveyor rights more easily and able to complete sensitive actions
- On disputed articles and during edit war, this will create an inequality between surveyors who can sight their edits and non-surveyors.
Some other sensitive actions may also be restricted to moderators, not necessarily related to confirmed revisions.