[Contero]

What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies.

Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal should be extremely new-user friendly.

I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run afoul of any editing policy.

[swalling]

Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia.

Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :(

Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant.

I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.

[Contero]

I would keep all the normal editing methods in place, but just add this as a friendly alternative for new users.

[bane]

This is a fabulous idea. More experienced WPedians could then offer advice as to what would make the change acceptable (must be cited to an actual policy) and the person doing the edit could keep working until they fulfilled the requirements, automatically completing a valid edit. There would be no possibility for immediate revert and any edit made this way would have to persist for some time.

[csense]

Congratulations. You've re-invented the pull request.