On 26 September 2014 11:43, Luca de Alfaro <luca(a)dealfaro.com> wrote:
Saving drafts on the other hand could help avoid many
conflicts on
less-trafficked pages.
Right now, on a page that is edited infrequently, this happens:
- User A starts an edit
- User A saves not to lose work, not quite done yet. Resumes the edit.
- User B (typically an editor) sees the edit by A, and sets to work
polishing it. Saves.
- User A saves --> conflict
The first edit by A "woke up" B, and led to the conflict.
If we allowed saving drafts, the following would be more likely:
- User A starts an edit
- User A saves a draft, and continues the edit.
- User A saves the edit.
- User B (typically an editor) sees the edit by A, and sets to work
polishing it. Saves.
The conflict would occur only if A had second-thoughts about the edit and
continues work after saving it, which might happen, but les frequently.
Of course saving drafts is also cumbersome to implement at scale (how long
would they persist? there would be clean up needed, etc; maybe they could
persist for one week then be mailed back to the author and deleted?).
Luca,
Yes, I agree. We're planning to add a locally-stored drafts feature to
VisualEditor, and hopefully we'll also find a way for that to work with
WikiEditor, to have a way for people to pause mid-edit. However, storing
these drafts on the server would pose some major legal issues that we are
keen to avoid.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester