On 16 November 2014 16:27, svetlana <[email protected]> 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=historysubmit&diff=218760&oldid=218759
> (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.

[email protected] | @jdforrester
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