The German Wikipedia checker-approved version

The German Wikipedia website is particularly vexed by vandalism. It uses a system for delaying changes from appearing till someone in authority like a designated checker has personally verified that the changes are not actually vandalism.

The changes will only appear on the website to any visitor, once a Wikipedia checker has signed off on them. The last checker-approved version is the one that most visitors will get to see before a checker has signed off. There are complicated exceptions to this, of course.

When a checker makes any change, it comes up immediately. Registered users, who constitute less than 5 per cent of Wikipedia users, will also get to see ‘unchecked’ versions.

Approximately 60 per cent of well over 750,000 German articles have already been checked. They are thus ‘under watch’ in the future. There are roughly 3,000 checkers. One of the administrators of the German Wikipedia, Mathias Schindler states that they are expecting the numbers to go up, because the only requirement is that someone needs to have made a total of 300 edits (none of them vandalism!).