They are not hidden in the history. If an edit has not been reviewed yet, a new button/tab titled "Entwurf" (draft) is shown at the top (between the "article" and "edit" buttons) that links to the latest non-reviewed version. So the "extra effort" consists of one simple click.

I don't see the problem. The personality rights warning doesn't mean that they don't want the image (it doesn't lead to deletion of the image), it just warns re-users that they probably can't do everything they want with this image. Many countries have laws that limit what you can do with images of other people without their explicit permission. For example, if there's a photo of Harrison Ford under a free license, it would be no problem to use it in encyclopedia articles, news stories, etc.. But a company can't use it to advertise their products without the permission of Mr. Ford.

Maybe the recent collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne that buried thousands of invaluable historical documents underneath tons of rubble will cause more historical archives to re-think and open up and share their contents with the public.

Unfortunately, many museums and archives are more concerned about making profits with their historical documents rather than making some effort to make them available to the broad public. Many still think they own the copyrights to century old documents and paintings just because they are in the museum's possession.

And 250k free historical photos are great news of course. As Germany's terms of copyright protection are 70 years after the author's death (just like the rest of Europe), most photos of 20th century historical events are still copyrighted. With this donation and the recent donation by the Bundesarchiv, we finally get lots of free images from this period of time.

There are exceptions for works of art and science, see Strafgesetzbuch  86a. So it's allowed to use the swastika in films, documentaries, history books, etc.. but it's not OK to print it on t-shirts for example.

Kaufhof is a fairly big chain, but not when it comes to games and electronics. The few Kaufhof stores I know have a rather limited selection of games and their prices are usually pretty high, so only few people buy their games there. Most of the time, they don't even change their prices over time, so you have to pay full price for games that are more than a year old. It's just a PR stunt to get some press (at the moment, the press will print anything that vaguely mentions "killer games"). I guess they are going to just put the games back on the shelves in a few month when nobody cares any more.

The purpose of the new system is not to prevent vandalism (idiots will still add their crap anyway), but to ensure that ordinary people won't see pages that include "xyz is a fag" or other such crap. Because it's shit like that that could give WP a bad reputation among the ordinary non-techy people.

Most people are of course able to identify such obvious vandalism. But only a small percentage of people reading Wikipedia actually realizes that everyone can edit the articles just by clicking the "edit" button. And even fewer know how to browse through the version history to access an unvandalized version or even restore this version. And while tech-savy slashdotters know how Wikipedia works and probably won't care, the IT-handicapped peeps are driven away from the site by such vandalism.

And there's a rather huge gap between 19th century editors that could decide what they wanted to see printed in their books/newspapers and what not; and "Sighters" (or whatever they will be called on the English WP) that only verify whether a new version (which is still viewable by everyone, just one mouseclick away) is vandalized or not. Especially if there are thousands of users with that status.

Unfortunately, no. Just my own experience. I'm not sure if there are any meaningful statistics that include information about trivial/non-trivial contributions ratio. There are of course lots of big, non-trivial edits by anonymous users, but I just wanted to point out that lots of changes can be checked for vandalism rather fast just by looking at the diff page.

You only read it and use it as a reference? So why are you against this system that lets you link to articles that are guaranteed to not include any obivous vandalism? You even can still read and link the newest version that is not yet checked for vandalism, if you want. I don't see your problem.

That's because the Sighted Versions system in the German Wikipedia is only used to verify that edits don't include obvious vandalism ("Bob's mohter is gay!!eleven"). You don't need any expertise to identify such obvious vandalism. Checking the accuarcy of those the newly added facts is done the same way it was done before this system was implemented (watchlists, wikiprojects, casual readers/editors, etc..)

And many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc.. those can be checked in a glance and flagged as "sighted". And edits by users with the sighter status (older than 60 days, more than 300 edits, clean block log) are flagged as "sighted" automatically. At the moment, there are about 5800 users with this status.

Saxon... handheld devices... Sounds like a masterplan. What are they going to do next? Shoot some satellites into orbit and start an earth-wide mobilephone satellite network?

Huh? Do you hear that sound? Kinda sounds like drums!?