Help talk:Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface

Feedback and discussion page for the Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface.

Update: We completely revised the interface for this feature based on user feedback and user test.

Report a new bug in Phabricator

You can post in any language here, preferably English or German.

On EnWikipedia we have {{Edit conflict}}. It would be very useful if this interface could automatically add the template to comments when triggered.

I said the issue in the title

Thanks for the report! All translations (except English) are done on translatewiki.net. I had a look, but can't find this exact sentence. The word "לעזור" appears a single time in twocolconflict-split-header-hint. The other words appear a few more times in these messages:

• twocolconflict-split-header-hint-beta
• twocolconflict-split-tour-popup2-header
• twocolconflict-split-tour-dialog-message-single-column-view
• twocolconflict-talk-header-overview

If you can't make the edits yourself, please let me know which message needs to be changed, and how.

I've translated the en.WP article Coordination Council (Belarus) on the French Wikipedia (Conseil de coordination (Biélorussie)). The good interlanguage links to Russian Wikipedia when the articles doesn't exist in the english WP have been wrongly translated in the French translation into English Wikipedia links to english WP articles which do not exist !

This does indeed sound like a bug. But:

• The interlanguage links are on Wikidata at d:Q98437710.
• I reviewed the history of fr:Conseil de coordination (Biélorussie) but couldn't spot an edit that fixes broken links, despite interlanguage links.
• How is this related to the edit conflict interface?

I see that the first edit on fr:Conseil de coordination (Biélorussie) is tagged as being done with Content translation/V2. Maybe your report was meant to go to Talk:Content translation?

If I open the editor for an answer and then think long enough about my answer, the tool erases every answer which was saved in the meantime. I don't think that's the way it should work.

We just had a Sperrprüfung because of this behaviorand I could reproduce it easily. --~~~~

@Seewolf yikes, that's unfortunate to say the least. I added a bug report to Phabricator and will provided an update as soon as possible --~~~~

@Seewolf: We haven't been able to reproduce the issue. You said you could do that. Can you explain in a little more detail how you did it?

I really liked the new edit conflict interface (the one with the radio buttons), but even with that, edit conflicts in discussions were still a pain. It was great for articles or editing the same text, but when adding to a discussion, I found myself, more often than not, just reopening the edit-interface and adding my text again because it was easier. I just got this new paragraph-based interface and it's amazing. I'm really excited about this feature and am thankful to everyone who is working on it!

My only suggestion is to add more helpful tooltips or labels. Having seen the previous radio-button interface, this one confused me a bit and it took me some time to figure out what would happen when I hit "publish". I think RoySmith gave a more detailed description below which was similar to my confusion. I remember when I first got the interface with the radio buttons that there were blue dots that were part of a tutorial or something? Could those be reintroduced?

+1

Hi @Wugapodes:, thanks for your feedback. We are glad to hear you like the new interfaces.

Currently, there are no blue buttons in the talk page edit conflict interface, but we will take your feedback into consideration and see how we can improve the tooltips and help text as we roll out the interface to more wikis.  --For the Technical Wishes Team

+1

I made this https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%9A%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%B0:%D0%9B%D1%83%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B5-%D0%90%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8B-1941-1945/doc&diff=108478188&oldid=93717675 edit, clicked save and was shown the conflict interface. (perhaps the mouse could quickly click twice on the save button) But the interface compared my edit with the revision (the last in the history of the template) from 2018!

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T36423

I've tried to edit conflict with myself in the Sandbox, but it just overwrote my first change with the second. A demo setup would be helpful.

Help:Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface#Usage mentions to enable the beta feature. There's no such option in my Beta Preferences, though according to the roadmap it's still in beta.

Hi @Aron Manning:, thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately, there is no demo setup available for this feature. You can create an edit conflict with yourself if you make one of the changes from a private/incognito window where you aren’t logged in to your account.

Whether the feature is available as a Beta Preference depends on which wiki you are on. On MediaWiki it is a default feature already, so it’s not shown as a Beta Preference in the list. The reason it’s still a beta feature on the roadmap is because it’s currently only a default feature on dewiki, arwiki, fawiki and Group 0 wikis (MediaWiki is in this group). For all other wikis it remains a beta feature for now. --For the Technical Wishes Team

> You can create an edit conflict with yourself if you make one of the changes from a private/incognito window where you aren’t logged in to your account.

Thank you for the detailed answers. To clarify: this means that if a user conflicts with themself, that case is ignored?

Hi @Aron Manning:, yes, that’s right. But the fact that a user’s conflict with themselves is ignored is not actually something that is decided by this interface. It’s something that the MediaWiki core code does through the “EditPage class”. We didn’t work on that code in this project, so whether an edit conflict is detected and then shown actually depends on the same MediaWiki core code that has been in place for a long time, not on the new paragraph-based edit conflict interface. -- For the Technical Wishes Team

I suspected that is the case. From one aspect it makes sense to avoid complicating editing with conflict resolution with oneself - probably editors just want their last version. Thank you for confirming this.

I'm sorry to hear this is causing confusion. MediaWiki's behavior is underspecified and rather inconsistent when "conflicting with yourself". There are dozens of tickets discussing this problem for years, most notably phab:T36423, phab:T58849, and phab:T222805, as well as very recent incidents, see phab:T246726. When testing the conflict resolution interface it's important to do this with two different users. One of them can be an anonymous, not logged in user, as Max already mentioned. That can be done using an incognito window.

The standard edit mode has three core buttons:

1. Publish Changes
2. Show Preview
3. Show Changes

The third button is missing in the new tool. The button brings up a standard DIFF which shows what changes will be made, and it does so in a familiar, formal, and extremely precise format. My last conflict was a bit more complicated than average, I did resolve it correctly, but during the process I wasn't 100% sure I had solved the edit conflict cleanly. I was painfully hesitant to save without being able to verify it via the ShowChanges diff. (It happened to be a talk page edit conflict, and there is heightened feeling of responsibility not to screw up other people's comments.)

Hi @Alsee:, thanks for your feedback. We decided to publish the feature without the ‘Show Changes’ option, because it actually is a very complex and resource intensive function to integrate into the feature.

However, we appreciate your feedback and will consider it in any further development of the tool. -- For the Technical Wishes Team

@Max Klemm (WMDE) your comment did not match my experience. I did directly handle the text of the other person's comment. Below I will describe my edit conflict and resolution. (If requested, I could dig up a link for the conflict diff.)

In the tool I had three separated regions of conflict to resolve:

• Top conflict choice: I had inserted a new line (a template). I resolved this conflict-region by selecting my version.

• Gray unchanged text: Old comments from multiple people.

• Middle conflict choice: One side had a new comment from someone else (I believe in yellow), the other side had a new comment by me (I believe in blue). I resolved this conflict-region by CTRL-C copying their text, clicking the edit pencil on my comment-area, and pasting their comment above mine. At the time I did not see any other way to resolve this conflict-portion. Either there was no other option present, or I missed it.

• Gray unchanged text: The start of a ===subsection===.

• Bottom conflict choice: Two people had added comments in this subsection. I resolved this conflict-region by selecting their version.

We decided to publish the feature without the ‘Show Changes’ option, because it actually is a very complex and resource intensive function to integrate into the feature.

Your meaning is somewhat unclear. Did you mean you would add the button in a later publication? Or did you mean you decided to drop the button from the end product? ShowChanges is probably used less often, but it serves an important function. ShowPreview and ShowChanges highlight or conceal essentially opposite aspects of the content.

Hi @Alsee:, sorry, if the last answer was not clear. Based on your description, you did not end up in the edit conflict interface  for talk pages, but in the general edit conflict interface shown in all other cases. The edit conflict interface for talk pages or discussion-based edit conflicts appears in the talk or project namespace when two people insert a new line in the same single place on the page at the same time. The general edit conflict interface appears, when two people edit two or more parts of the same page at the same time. In your case, unfortunately, you ended up in the general interface since you added both a new line and added a new comment to the discussion on the page. This is of course not optimal, so thank you for letting us know about this case so that we can try to address it through future improvements.  

As for the ShowChanges button, currently we do not have plans to add the button. However, we will consider your feedback in any planning of changes we would make in the future and potentially come back to you for more input if you would be open to it? -- For the Technical Wishes Team

I just got the new beta interface for the first time. To be honest, I find it totally confusing. Some of it makes sense. There's two text boxes, highlighted in yellow and blue. I get that. The blue one on the bottom is what I wrote, the yellow one on the top is what somebody else wrote. So far, so good.

Then, there's a button with up and down arrows which flips those two. I don't understand this. It switches which is on top, but other than this trivial layout change, I don't see that it performs any useful function.

My text has two controls on it, a checkmark and an X. Again, I have no clue what these do. The checkmark has a tooltip, "Apply your changes to this text". I don't understand what that means. Does it mean, take this change and automatically merge it into the other text? The X tooltip says, "Discard all your changes to this text". I'm afraid to even click that one because I don't know what it'll do. Discard permanently with no way to recover the text?

Sorry, this is just totally mystifying. And I say that as a software engineer with many years of using merge conflict resolution tools.

PS, I did what I usually do. I copied my text to the clipboard, opened up the same page in another window, and redid my edit there. That seems much simpler and understandable than any of the automatic merge tools I've seen tried.

Hi @RoySmith:, we have seen your feedback and need some more time to discuss it with our team. I will come back to you at the beginning of next week. -- For the Technical Wishes Team

Hi @RoySmith:, thanks for your constructive feedback. Your comments are helpful for understanding where usability improvements could be made to the interface. To explain what the controls you mention should do, both symbols (the check mark and the X) only appear if you decide to edit your post (click into the textbox) in the talk page edit conflict interface. By clicking the check mark, you save any changes you’ve made to your post in the interface. By clicking on the X, every change you made in the talk page edit conflict interface is discarded and you will see the text of your initial post (which resulted in the initial edit conflict). --For the Technical Wishes Team

it's good. I don´t hace problems with this tool

Great, we are glad to hear it works for you. :)