Discussion and vote system for big changes
I have wanted to edit the tables on the *Market pages to eliminate the "Designed for MoinMoin Release..." and "...and Revision..." columns. The release is part of the table title, and most times the revision is not filled in anyway. This was what I considered a "big" change that I would want to be able to propose as a change in some way and see if there is support.
Another big change that I have been hesitant to do is to change the [[FullSearch(Category Market)]] on the Extensions page to [[PageList(regex:.*Market$)]] and rename some of the Market pages to end in "Market". Why? Because every page that has "Category Market" (without the space) shows up on the Extensions page. Even if "Category Market" is in a comment!
I have thought of two different ways for this to work.
Discussion page similar to Wikipedia: This would be a discussion page which would be affiliated with each page. This might just be a convention. For example: MacroMarketDiscussion
Draft page that is queued for approval: Page changes are queued for approval. After a page gets a certain number of yes votes, it becomes the real page. The big contributors whose changes are not reversed could get extra voting privledges, something akin to http://www.slashdot.org. Maybe trivial changes could be pushed through, otherwise changes are queued. What "trivial" means is up to what could be easily coded. I have never got Zope to work for me, but I think this is something like the way Zope handles pages, though I am proposing something less rigid. This could also be really nice way to handle spam.
- As long as it is a single or few pages changes and it is well-thought-over, I would just do it. There is revert if somebody thinks it is bad. If a change involves changing many pages, you can discuss it directly on some appropriate page. I don't think we need additional features for that. And voting has problems on its own.
Addendum
I vote also like to see two voting systems implemented. One is for editors to vote on their confidence in the material presented so users accessing a wiki can see how confident the editors are about the trustworthiness of the information. A second voting mechanism is for users to vote on how useful a wiki page actually is to (a) tell other users about their experience and (b) tell the editors how good a job they've done.