https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41338
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Bug #: 41338
Summary: Ways to reduce edit conflicts
Product: MediaWiki
Version: unspecified
Platform: All
OS/Version: All
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: Unprioritized
Component: Page editing
AssignedTo: [email protected]
ReportedBy: [email protected]
Classification: Unclassified
Mobile Platform: ---
On EN wiki in particular edit conflicts are frequent, especially at new page
patrol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol#Aggressive_new_page_patrol_edit-conflicts
is the latest example of this causing arguments in the community. Edit
conflicts waste a lot of editor time and they make the editing experience suck.
The 25% of Newbies who start by creating a new article are particularly
vulnerable to edit conflicts, as are the many editors who try to start editing
on a major breaking new story.
It has been a while since we have seen a major change to the way that the
interface treats edit conflicts. But in many cases it should be possible to
reduce edit conflicts. Reducing edit conflicts would greatly improve site
experience, immediately increase the number of edits that actually take place,
and almost certainly improve newbie retention.
There is one easy way to reduce edit conflicts and one difficult way. The two
are so different I should probably raise them as two different Bugzilla
requests, but I'm feeling lazy.
The easy way is to disable the edit button for very busy articles. Experienced
editors already know that if a page is going to be busy you edit a section and
you don't try to edit the whole article. So to reduce edit conflicts on
"trending articles" and Jimbo's talkpage, the system needs to automatically
notice which articles are busy and when anyone clicks the big edit button at
the top of a busy article render: "Sorry, but this article is currently very
busy, so to reduce edit conflicts you can only edit one section at a time.
Please pick the section you want to edit", then gave them a choice of sections.
The difficult thing is to reduce edit conflicts at newpage patrol and other
random encounters when two people try to edit an otherwise rarely edited page.
A typical conflict here is that the person who has just started a new article
adds a sentence to it 2 minutes after creation, but a newpage patroller has
already added a template or a category. Since most such articles start without
any section headings this pretty much guarantees an edit conflict. Now the
complicated way to reduce edit conflicts here would be to have some logic in
the editor that treated paragraphs, categories and templates as independent
entities much as it does sections, so if one page patroller adds a category,
and another bolds the first two words of the article and wiki links a word in
the second line, and the newbie who has started the article then adds a second
sentence, the system should treat all three simultaneous edits as complementary
and composite them together so that all three editors have successful edits.
Some of this could of course be reduced by the simple expedient of starting all
new articles with two lines "==References==" and "{{reflist}}" in the middle of
the first screen. Then assuming that if two people are editing the whole
article but only actually changing one section, then their edit can be treated
as a section edit. This would avoid edit conflicts between categorisors and
those who are adding or amending content, it might even prompt some editors to
actually add a reference. Shifting more of the templates from the start of the
article to the end would also reduce edit conflicts as they would be in the
references section. ~~~~
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