On Nov 12, 2014 9:44 AM, "James Forrester" jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 8 November 2014 22:01, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Honestly i dont think anyone's even tried to improve the conflict
screen.
There's probably a lot of low hanging fruit on the usability of edit conflicts which could be persued that have nothing to do with the hard, real time editing solutions (as cool as those are).
If someone is intrested in trying to improve edit conflicts, id
reccomend
starting with: *only showing relavent parts. If your conflict is in a section, and you were doing a section edit, dont ask user to resolve entire page (this is particularly painful on VP type pages).
Yes, though this is normally triggered because the section isn't called what it used to be; if you're appending a new section to the end of the page I think it works fine.
I think there is some cases where if someone adds a new section while you are editing the last line of the previously last section, it will conflict. I guess more research is needed to even enumerate all the common edit conflicts.
Furthermore: find some way to present only the conflicted lines (ie what conflict markers show in a source control system) in a user friendly
way.
The normal way to solve this UX problem is "three column diff", but that (a) isn't remotely good for mobile interfaces, and (b) adds Yet Another Interface which may confuse as much as it assists. We'd need a lot of painful UX research and a huge amount of developer time here, I feel.
I think you're right if we really want to do it well. But this might be one of those cases where we can make it suck much less without quite making it "good", which might be worthwhile in this case. Maybe.
--bawolff