On 16 November 2014 16:27, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
On the second edit conflict, I read the message at the
page top. It says:
Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper
text area contains the page text as it currently exists. **Your changes are
shown in the lower text area.** You will have to merge your changes into
the existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when
you press "Save page".
Emphasis added by me. We all know that people fail to read though. If we
can come up with a more colorful error message or a more intuitive edit
conflict page layout, I'm all ears.
However, any "colourful" message will likely get ignored more, not seen
more – a problem which is exacerbated by wikis modifying many of the most
common messages to be colourful. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness for more.
As to (semi-automatic) conflict resolution, our diff
viewer probably has
to be fixed first - any conflict resolution starts with identifying the
differences, and our diff viewer fucks up at smallest possible edits or
problems as soon as an extra line break is involved, i.e.
https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AGryllida&action=his…
(Were the first sentence edit and second sentence edits made separately,
and with a conflict, the logic would die (esp. with an extra line break
change involved inbetween)).
Moving to character-level rather than paragraph-level diffing might help
here, potentially. I vaguely remember that we attempted that and abandoned
it because it caused more issues than it solved back in ?2004, though.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester