I am doing research on concurrent editing of shared objects and I am thinking on using Wikipedia as a source for update patterns. After downloading and importing the database to my mysql, I can now check the info I need: Object, User and Timestamp.

However, I noticed that unlike other Wikis there is no longer a lock when multiple users concurrently try to edit the same object. As you know, currently in Wikipedia the user that tries to commit a concurrent version will get asked to merge its contents with the previously commited state.

My questions is:

Is there any flag on table "old" that indicates that a given update was done after merging with the previous version ? This kind of information would be usefull for my extraction of patterns, since I am interested on the conflict rate.

Thanks in advance for any help that you might be able to give me.

Regards, Carlos

Carlos Baquero Distributed Systems Group Fax +351 25360 4471 University of Minho, Portugal Voice +351 25360 4449 cbm@di.uminho.pt http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/cbm/