Unfortunately, it doesn't really help (see
https://forum.dokuwiki.org/thread/14939). It doesn't default to showing the published version. If I understood your suggestion in that thread, establishing a separate
authors group would present the 'draft' version of
everything that's currently in draft (unapproved) mode to authors, and the 'published' versions to non-authors. Everyone is potentially both an author and a consumer, and will generally want to see the published version of everything except draft he or she is working on.
If I understand groups correctly, a user cannot be assigned to two groups (say
writers and
readers) and choose which group he wants to belong to at login. If he could, we might say that as a
reader you do not get to see drafts, and as a
writer you
do get to see (all) drafts, which would solve the problem. However, I don't think it's possible to pick a group at login. The only other thing I thought of was to have everyone have two user ids -
charrison and
charrison_writer - but our System Admins rejected that.