Topic on Help talk:Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface/Flow

In the beginning the interface would often open without any actual reason.

This seems to have gotten a lot better now and the tool has been very helpful to me many times.

I often keep an editor box open for several days and work on the content while in the meantime other editors save changes to the article as well.

The tool does not seem to realize this every time and often will not open.

This leads to two obvious questions which are not answered on the Help page:

• How does the tool figure out whether an edit conflict might be about to happen? Does it actually know that a new version of the article was saved by another editor while I was typing in the editor box on my computer?
• Would it be possible to force the interface to open when I already know that the source text was changed while I was intermittently editing the text in my browser over a longer period? many thanks, ~~~~

Thanks a lot for the nice words. TwoColConflict relies on the existing conflict detection mechanism in MediaWiki core. It remembers the "base revision id" of the revision that was used to start the edit, checks if there is a more recent revision, and if the two happen to touch the same paragraphs. No, it's not possible to enforce this process. You have to click "Publish changes" and see what happens.

In case you want to play around with the feature you can open an anonymous browser window where you are not logged in (or logged in with a second account) and do slightly different edits to the same page (ideally a sandbox page) in the two windows. Whoever saves first wins, and the second one runs into an edit conflict.

The "if the two happen to touch the same paragraphs" point is probably the pivotal aspect. Many times, someone editing "over" you doesn't result in an edit conflict, because they edited some completely different part of the page that your edits don't also touch. There's no need for the conflict resolution interface to open in those cases, so it doesn't. Actual edit conflicts are (thankfully) pretty rare, no matter how long an edit has been in progress or how many times the page has been modified since it was started.