[WikiEN-l] [WikiEn-l] Why do edit conflicts suck so much?

[David Gerard]

On 17/03/2008, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/03/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

>  > The automatic merging isn't very good, I think that's a known issue.
>  >  I'm not sure how much it's meant to be able to cope with - I'll take a
>  >  look at the code.

> In my experience, as these things go, it's not too bad.
>  Automerge systems have certain largely insoluble problems- for example
>  if two people edit the same point in a file then then they can't
>  handle it- but there's really no way to know what the correct thing to
>  do would be in that case; which one do you put first? In the
>  wikipedia, particularly talk pages, people often add things in the
>  same place, so a conflict will be flagged.


It's much better than before we had automatic merging. That was a
*major* pain in the arse on any page with any degree of activity.
WP:ANI is probably a good example of an automerge stress test.


- d.