There's been a lot of buzz about Wikipedia's Flagged Revisions policy, which will be starting a 2 month trial soon. This meanscertain high-profile pages will require a process referred to as "moderation" in traditional content management systems. Changes made to one of these protected pages are added to a queue for review before being published on the site. Or something like that.

Though some open content diehards are riling at the decision, most seem to agree that Wikipedia's importance as an information source to the world has risen to a point where the negative effect of "bad edits" has surpassed the positive effect of open editing, at least for key pages.

What is important to recognize with this change is not the inevitable failure of the wiki process. Instead, the wiki model has worked so well for Wikipedia that just now, as one of the Internet's largest and busiest web sites, has content moderation been required for a few key pages. That's something to celebrate.

Content moderation is a standard feature in any self-respecting content management system. New implementations are riddled with multi-tier workflows that introduce bureaucracy and roadblocks to what should be the primary goal of the system: to collect and manage content.

Moderation of new content is a frequent feature request of new customers at EditMe. My response is always the same: "That's not how wikis work." If you want content moderation, you don't want a wiki. If you want to encourage contribution, participation, communication and collaboration, then you must recognize that moderation workflows work directly against that goal. And sometimes, very infrequently, that's actually necessary.

So let's sit back and marvel at the success of the wiki model. You can only hope your wiki will be so unfathomably important and necessary to some day require moderation of a few select pages.