Pedro M.V. wrote:
I was translating a big article fron english wipedia to spanish wipedia.
I stored the changes (the article was very long, I remark ) using preview.
After some time writting, I tried to save the changes ( indicating " Manual translations ends here; it´s going to be continued") when appeared a DNS error.
I tried to go backwards and the broswer said me " Page has been expired".
So , I missed all the work.
For prevent it, I suggest create a third button named " Temporally save" or similar, to store the articles created by the author, without publish them.
So, later, after improving it, the author can publish it in the wikipedia.
I'm familiar with that problem, and it can be very annoying in every language, especially if your edits have been long or complicated. My experience has been that when I get such a message, it is still there later if I use the reload button, but it is destroyed completely if I use the back button. Pedro's idea is a constructive one but the buttons are part of one's browser and not of Wikipedia.
Something similar could happen if any save or preview attempt were first put into a person's cache, and if the save or preview were successful it could then be deleted.
Alternatively, flowing from the idea of a read only mirror site that keeps the data available while the main computer is down, the second computer could also have a queue file that saves attempted changes. In a boilerplate statement6 it would notify the contributor that "because of circumstances above and beyond our control.....", and notify him that his contributions have been saved in a temporary file. When the system comes back up it would integrate the edits in the queue. As long as the emergency prevails it would not permit users to start any new edits.
Eclecticology