[WikiEN-l] [WikiEn-l] Why do edit conflicts suck so much?

[Ian Woollard]

On 17/03/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> The automatic merging isn't very good, I think that's a known issue.
>  I'm not sure how much it's meant to be able to cope with - I'll take a
>  look at the code.

In my experience, as these things go, it's not too bad.

Automerge systems have certain largely insoluble problems- for example
if two people edit the same point in a file then then they can't
handle it- but there's really no way to know what the correct thing to
do would be in that case; which one do you put first? In the
wikipedia, particularly talk pages, people often add things in the
same place, so a conflict will be flagged.

IRC it handles it if two people add something to two different parts
of the same section; I don't really think you can expect much better
than that.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.