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I was just editing an article, did a significant amount of work on it, then pressed save, and was given an "edit conflict" message. that was it. I think found out that my colleague Karl had already got the page into edit mode, and was fixing the same problems I was looking at ;-) We need a better way to handle this. For a start, we ought to disallow other people from starting to edit when there is someone else already editing that article. Second, how do we allow people to make sure work is saved when a conflict occurs that could cause work loss?
Disallowing other folks from editing an article if someone else has it open doesn't work because what happens if someone opens an article for editing and then goes on a vacation? Generally MediaWiki actually does a pretty reasonable job of helping you with merge conflicts when editing. For some reason it appears to be broken--we've seen it in practice before on webplatform.org, so it USED to work.
(In reply to comment #1) > Disallowing other folks from editing an article if someone else has it open > doesn't work because what happens if someone opens an article for editing > and then goes on a vacation? If someone goes on vacation then their should be a timeout to unlock the page for others to edit. Dokuwiki has this type of feature but it is a flat-filebased wiki and can't do conflict merging like MediaWiki should.
(In reply to comment #2) > (In reply to comment #1) > > Disallowing other folks from editing an article if someone else has it open > > doesn't work because what happens if someone opens an article for editing > > and then goes on a vacation? > > > If someone goes on vacation then their should be a timeout to unlock the > page for others to edit. Dokuwiki has this type of feature but it is a > flat-filebased wiki and can't do conflict merging like MediaWiki should. This is the kind of thing I was thinking of - a timeout system should surely work.
"that was it" was it though? I always thought you'd have a chance to merge your edit with the other person's with the aid of a diff, like described here [1]. I haven't checked edit conflicts on WPD, so semantic forms or such could interfere with conflict handling. If that's the case it would be best to fix it so the normal MediaWiki conflict handling can be used (better to merge wiki-code than to loose everything). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_conflict