[Wikipedia-l] Edit conlfict screen (was: A concept from Buckminster Fuller)

[Brion Vibber]

On Fri, 2002-11-22 at 15:09, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Brion,
> 
> I've been confused by the "edit conflict" screen so many times that I seriously think the page should be redesigned. Other contributors also have frequently commented on talk pages that they lost what they just typed, due to edit conflicts.

Agreed, it's hideous and evil.

> I'd like to have the columnwise, side by side "revision of" display show up at the top of the page, where I can't possible miss it!!

As with the preview, it's to easy to miss if you don't know it's there.
I like the symmetry of putting it in the middle, but putting it at the
top is probably better for usability.

> Below that, I'm not sure what needs to come next, but:
> * we need to make it VERY EASY for users to recover from the edit conflict

Occasionally during 'extreme editing' conditions, such as on a very
contentious talk page where one of the other contributors revises their
edits every three seconds, I find I have to go through several conflict
cycles just to get a chunk of text inserted that doesn't itself touch
parts of the text that the other people are editing. I only have to
cut-n-paste and click "save", but it gets tedious.

It should be possible for the software to attempt to merge edits
together, then ask for confirmation on what it can do and fixes for what
it can't -- in the best case, you would just have to click 'confirm'; in
the worst case, manual editing like now. (If 'patch' can do this on
source code, we should be able to do it on text.) Someone more familiar
with this kind of text processing should mess with it rather than me...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)