Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

I've floated this idea several times before, but I've never put it here.

I would like to suggest a feature alternative to manually flagging individual versions as stable.  Specifically, I would suggest a sort of time delay where the live version shown to the not-logged-in public is the last version to go at least X minutes without being edited, i.e. a version that was stable in the empirical sense of not having been editted.  (My suggestion for X is something like 15-30 minutes on enwiki.)  So then vandalism and other bad edits that can be caught in less than X minutes will never be shown to the public.

The time delay might be applied selectively so as to only affect anonymous and new editors (for example), which would avoid the problem of vandalism persisting after an admin removed it.

By doing something like this, one limits the probability that the viewing public will encounter vandalism, without needing the overhead associated with manually flagging good versions of each article.  I would envision this as an alternative option to page protection, possibly with admin controllable settings for which editor groups have their edits delayed and for how long.

-Robert Rohde