On 16 November 2014 16:27, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
On the second edit conflict, I read the message at the page top. It says:
Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text area contains the page text as it currently exists. **Your changes are shown in the lower text area.** You will have to merge your changes into the existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when you press "Save page".
Emphasis added by me. We all know that people fail to read though. If we can come up with a more colorful error message or a more intuitive edit conflict page layout, I'm all ears.
However, any "colourful" message will likely get ignored more, not seen more – a problem which is exacerbated by wikis modifying many of the most common messages to be colourful. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness for more.
As to (semi-automatic) conflict resolution, our diff viewer probably has to be fixed first - any conflict resolution starts with identifying the differences, and our diff viewer fucks up at smallest possible edits or problems as soon as an extra line break is involved, i.e. https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AGryllida&action=hist... (Were the first sentence edit and second sentence edits made separately, and with a conflict, the logic would die (esp. with an extra line break change involved inbetween)).
Moving to character-level rather than paragraph-level diffing might help here, potentially. I vaguely remember that we attempted that and abandoned it because it caused more issues than it solved back in ?2004, though.
J.