On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 1:56 PM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 16 November 2014 14:36, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
James: would it be possible to automatically save the text of a page to a user's sandbox when they encounter an edit conflict? This would overwrite the content of the sandbox, but that could be reverted using the normal history page for the sandbox.
Hmm. Publishing content without the user clicking the "Save page" button a second time feels very icky. Also, would we need to go around and auto-delete these for users once the edit conflict was fixed? This doesn't sound like a perfect solution. There's also the issue with "the user's sandbox" not existing as an actual thing, just a hack that a couple of wikis have invented…
Maybe we should make the (read only) "your content" box more prominent, appearing before the "current content" one? Not sure this would help more than it would hinder everyone for the order to be reversed.
J.
Why not just interleave or nest the conflicted edit in the history of the page? So if you are editing revision 1, and conflict with someone elses revision 2, save your revision as 2 and the next person's revision as 3? There's some ugliness in the revision history to resolve (like timestamps), and potentially other ways it could be done, but I see no reason not to slot the conflicted edit into the history while prompting the user to merge into a current revision.