Several weeks ago, I reported what I thought to be some sort of bug. At that time, it involved the Wikipedia:Orphaned articles page becoming "duplicated", meaning that the text of the page appeared two and a fraction times.
I heard talk of this sort of thing happening elsewhere, and now it has happened on Village pump.
In both cases (Orphaned articles and Village pump), there were three very quick edits by one user -- apparently repeated clicking of the submit button?
Please take a look at the three edits to Village Pump by User:Calmypal at 19:35, 29 Apr 2004.
It appears that the first one happened normally. The second one replaced the page with a partial copy of the page. The third one seemed to have a partial page followed by a full page.
Note also that the first and third edit summaries include the "M" for a minor edit, and a header in the summary. The middle one had no "M" and no summary.
So, the user pressed submit, which worked but the user didn't see the results. The user pressed submit a second time, and then a third time sometime in the middle of the second's processing, interrupting the second and appending the third. Does that somehow make sense?
Is it somehow possible that the edit conflict resolution gets confused when it has a conflict between the same user (if you know what I mean)?
I know that all the information is preserved in the history, but fixing it, especially on a heavy use page like Village pump, is a real pain in the butt.
Just out of curiosity, if I have two open edit sessions of the same page, and press submit on both in very short succession, what happens?
-Rich Holton
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