On Die, 2003-01-28 at 13:05, Jimmy Wales wrote:

----- Forwarded message from Michael Hardy hardy@math.mit.edu -----

From: Michael Hardy hardy@math.mit.edu Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 22:16:19 -0500 (EST) To: jwales@bomis.com Subject: edit conflicts

We desparately need a better way to handle edit conflicts

than the current method of destroying 20 minutes work without warning. -- Mike

Hi Michael,

yes, we need a better way to handle edit conflicts; but in any case, your work should not be destroyed! Unless something went very wrong, you should be given two edit windows, one with the new version saved by someone else and one with your version, and a list of changes. You can then incorporate (copy&paste) your changes into the new version. Please let us know if this was not the case.

There are some things we can do:

1) Use the "merge" UNIX utility or write our own code to try to auto-merge in case of conflicts; only present edit conflict (with a single edit window and CVS style conflict markers) when text cannot be merged

2) Show a warning if someone has started to edit the text < x minutes before you have

3) On Talk pages, provide links to append comments, which should work with every revision

These have been talked about before and will likely be implemented at some point.

Regards,

Erik