Help talk:Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface

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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.

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Vagueness of Message

1
Robert McClenon (talkcontribs)

The edit conflict interface doesn't indicate whether forcing one's edit through will preserve the edit by the other user or will wipe out the previous edit. Since it doesn't say that the previous edit will be preserved, I have found it best to temporarily save my edit, and back out from it, and apply it again. If the edit conflict interface is meant to preserve the other edit, it should say so. ~~~~

Reply to "Vagueness of Message"
מיכי י-ם (talkcontribs)

אני לא יודע אנגלית לכן אני כותב בעברית. אני משתמש בפונקצייה הזו באתר שלא שייך לויקימדיה, היום ניסיתי לשמור עריכה והוא התריע לי על התנגשות עריכה עם עריכה שבוצעה לפני יומיים.

Reply to "באג"
65.39.10.23 (talkcontribs)

I like this.

Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Thank you! We're happy to hear it.

Happy new year from the Technical Wishes team!

Johanna

Reply to "Like"
97.115.143.75 (talkcontribs)

Was reporting AIV and got a message about feedback for a Beta feature.

Reply to "How did I get here?"
RoySmith (talkcontribs)

I've probably commented here before, but I just got another instance of this and felt compelled to talk about it. Every time I'm dropped into the EC tool, I'm totally befuddled as to how to proceed. I'm a software developer, I'm used to merge conflicts. Every merge conflict tool I've ever used has some way to say, "Keep this version", "Keep that version", "Keep both". I don't see any of that here. I see a box which shows "Conflicting comment", and another box which shows "Your comment", and no indication of how I'm supposed to proceed to select which, or both, I want to keep. I'm going to do what I always do; copy my text, abort the edit, and start again from scratch, pasting in my saved text.

I'll add that edit conflict resolution is something people do rarely. That means they don't remember the details of how the tool worked the last time they used it, so it's got to be totally obvious how things work in order to be effective. The developers who wrote the tool use it all the time, so it's hard to step back and ask themselves, "If I knew nothing about how this worked, would I be able to figure it out?"

Robert McClenon (talkcontribs)

I agree, and have been annoyed by this often. If it isn't going to give me useful instructions, why doesn't it just say, "Your edit has been aborted. You can copy it and try again"? ~~~~

Neonorange (talkcontribs)

I agree—I just bull my way through and seem to get random consequences—as if some critical timing issue picks an outcome with no meaningful interaction on my part. (What request initiated this beta offering what were the goals?

Kudpung (talkcontribs)

Totally confusing and useless.

The places where edit conflicts happen most are on very long talk pages that handle a multitude of different threads, such as for example the VP or ANI. But wouldn't expect the WMF devs to understand that, would you?

As per [[User:Rober McClenon|Robert]], why doesn't it just say, "Your edit has been aborted. You can copy it and try again"?

By the time one has figured out what to - and still left wondering - it's quicker and easier to copy your text, quit the page, reload it and paste your comment in the fresh edit mode display.

Reply to "This makes no sense"

日本語における表示について

4
ドラみそ (talkcontribs)

日本語のWikipediaで編集をしていると、「了承ました。」という表示がありました。この言葉は変えたほうがいいと思います。日本語として成立しません。

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

When I was editing on Japanese Wikipedia, there was a display saying "I understand." I think you should change this word. It doesn't work as Japanese.

These translations are done on translatewiki.net by a community of volunteers. Can you make the edit yourself or contact the community?

Omotecho (talkcontribs)

Unhelpful on a long thread with many replies on talk page

2
PamD (talkcontribs)

Two of us were trying to reply at the same time in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Recent_correction_to_Simple_Lists. I had to choose between the other editor's comment and mine. I opted for theirs, and had to copy mine from the right-hand column of the diff display, cancel my edit, go back in and find the right place in the thread again (hoping that no-one else was also replying), and paste it back in again. I don't know what would have happened if they;'d politely opted for my post instead of theirs: some kind of Mexican standoff? In the old system I could at least see what was going on. Not impressed with the new system, as yet. PamD (talk) 13:51, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Hello @PamD, thank you for your message, and apologies for taking so long to reply (vacation time).

Our team has looked into this and would need a bit more information to see what happened here. Are this and this the two edits that triggered the conflict?

From what got stored in these two edits, it looks like they should have triggered a special talk page interface that looks like this:

This interface was made specifically for talk pages and it allows you to save both edits, just like you wanted in this case.

The reason it didn't work here might be that the detection for this special case only works when no other edit was made to the page. Was your original edit possibly fixing e.g. a typo somewhere else on the page?


"I don't know what would have happened if they;'d politely opted for my post instead of theirs: some kind of Mexican standoff?"

While a Mexican standoff sounds interesting, that's not what would have happened. In an edit conflict, two people are editing the same page. If the other person saves the page before you do, you run into an edit conflict. To the other person, however, their work is done. They don't see any edit conflict interface.

Another question, when you say "old system", are you talking about this interface?

Greetings,

Johanna

Reply to "Unhelpful on a long thread with many replies on talk page"

Attempted edit-conflict resolution lost page history

2
Summary by Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE)
Miniapolis (talkcontribs)

When I began copyediting 2020–2021 Slovenian protests, the infobox indicated that the protests continued into 2022. I moved the page to reflect this, edit-conflicting with myself. I've never really understood this interface, must have hit the wrong radio buttons, and somehow lost the previous page history. I didn't think it was possible for the work of other editors to be lost like this. I'm using Windows 10 and the latest version of Firefox.

Miniapolis (talkcontribs)

Fixed now, thanks to Izno.

FunkyBeats99 (talkcontribs)

On my local dev wiki, the (just installed) feature is broken : I choose thanks to the radio buttons which version I want to keep, but when I click save, the page reloads and every conflict paragraph is highlighted in red. None of the options I chose are memorized. If I start over and try to save again, the same thing happens.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Unfortunately that's not enough information. How was the conflict resolution interface triggered? How many rows of radio buttons appeared? Is JavaScript enabled? Does the JavaScript console show some error? It might also be the configuration of your webserver or PHP somehow not accepting array-structured form variables. But this is all speculation. Sorry.

FunkyBeats99 (talkcontribs)

Thanks for your swift response.

I trigger myself the conflict resolution thanks to two separate accounts (since it is my dev wiki) on two separate browsers (I tried a bunch, does not seem to be the cause of it).

I run MediaWiki 1.35.6 on a local EasyPHP dev server (Apache 2.4.25 x86 - PHP 7.4.19 x86 - MySQL 5.7.17 x86).

Javascript is enabled and works fine. No particular message in browser console either.

The error happens whether there is more than one paragraph or just one.

It seems that if I choose the newest, not saved yet, revision, the page reloads with a red "alert" background-color on conflicting paragraphs and deletes all choices.

If I choose the already saved revision, the paragraphs that had conflicts just disappear, but the page is still not saved: the interface shows then only the unchanged paragraphs, which is really weird.

I hear you about the PHP version, but every other extension works perfectly, so that would be odd.

Might be linked to my other extension configurations, I'll try on a fresh install and keep you posted.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

That sounds really strange. Sorry, I have no idea. I even went back and tested this older version (it's almost 2 years old by now) and it seems to work fine for me. The error sounds like parts (?) of the POST request are lost. Maybe it's an overly aggressive security or spam protection plugin in Apache or PHP?

Reply to "Won't work"
Liz (talkcontribs)

For some reason, this "tool" posts my comments duplicate times, as if I have an edit conflict with myself. I then have to go back and remove the excess comments from the page. This has happened more often than not with this tool. When I have a chance, I'll try to figure out how to disable it.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Thank you for the report. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what kind of response you expect? Are you able to post some example links where this happened? That would help a lot investigating this issue further. So far it sounds like a long known issue with the edit conflict detection algorithm in MediaWiki core, which is what TwoColConflict depends on. See for example phab:T28821, phab:T36423, phab:T59264, or phab:T222805. TwoColConflict is essentially just an interface on top of that.

Liz (talkcontribs)

Well, when the Beta feature pops up, I get a message to come here to offer feedback so that's what I did. I don't know if I have expectations, I just followed the suggestion to come here and post.

You can see one example of this if you look at my contributions and look at the posting to WP:ANI at 21:03, November 5, 2021. It posts twice in the same moment and the next edit I delete the duplicate entry.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

I would love to do something about this. Let's see. There are two edits, the first at 04:03:14 UTC, the second 27 second later. That's not exactly the same moment. Furthermore, the second edit is marked as a revert. Why is that?

KaiKemmann (talkcontribs)

This happens to me several times a month.

I encounter these "Edit conflicts with myself" when I try to edit my previous edit shortly afterwards to correct some mistake or other.

It is often not possible to choose between different versions (as there are no check boxes or rather check circles offered) so the obvious option is to click "publish" which results in the corrected text passage being appended to the one added in the previous edit.

See here where I tried to correct a small spelling mistake in my previous edit when the "Edit conflict" interface popped up ...

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