On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 02:14:03PM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
Color me confused: I thought we'd had *this* for *years*...
We do, sufficient enough. MediaWiki will attempt to merge edits (simple merging, we're not talking gratuitous hyper-intelligent stuff) if it can; I would wager that a lot of edit conflicts are avoided in this step alone. Of course, if it can't, it throws a conflict. And I expect sometimes something upsets it, and it throws a conflict for the sheer hell of it. :)
There's quite a bit that could be done in the edit conflict arena, though. Three-way merging of edits, anyone? A friendlier conflict UI would be a damn good start, although I have to admit I'm not sure what I'd call a "friendlier conflict UI"...I'd have to think on it.
One immediate improvement that someone could make is to have MediaWiki handle in-section conflicts without "breaking out" and showing both copies of the full text. Current behaviour means that, e.g. two editors adding comments in a section on a discussion page who cause an edit conflict will have to battle with the full text of the page...which, as we all know, can be quite a considerable whack.
Come to think of it, yeah, I guess the Edit Conflict page *does* show the whole page, doesn't it. I don't fight that battle too often.
Cheers, -- jra