Talk:Submissions/Encouraging early stage editors
Edit conflicts
Edit conflicts are a pain, and I don't know what proportion of editors manage to figure out how to salvage their edit after an edit conflict. But is incorrect to say that an edit conflict means that an edit is irretrievably lost, we just need to show you how to resolve them. That said edit conflicts do lose us a lot of edits, and they are obviously one of the major reasons why Wikipedia is perceived as a bitey environment for newbies - something that would only get worse if Visual Editor was rolled out on EN wiki as it does not support section editing so the newbies who are most likely to use it will be disproportionately the ones bitten by edit conflicts. There have been several suggestions on Bugzilla as to how more edit conflicts could be resolved, personal favourites of mine would be to recognise the # as a paragraph delimiter and to accept that someone adding a category or a template need not be treated as a conflict with someone adding more text. Unfortunately such low cost high impact opportunities don't fare well in the current bugzilla environment and they tend to languish there or get flagged as "won't fix" - one of many reasons why Bugzilla needs to be wound down and migrated to meta or another wiki where more non-developers will take part in prioritisation of developments. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:52, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
- I too have lost work due to an edit conflict in the past. But, it is a software solution that WMF should address. The topic of encouraging new editors is bold and noteworthy. But, the abstract reads harsh. The presenter should say something like " I have a plan of three parts and will explain in detail at my presentation." instead of listing the bad things of Wikipedia. So, what is the synopsis of the plan? Geraldshields11 (talk) 22:36, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
- Complaints are like a goldmine, you have to sift out a lot of stuff to get to the paydirt. I don't know whether his dislike of us copy editors is because he would rather not have his typos corrected, or because he has had edit conflicts with us and lost half an hours work because someone corrected a typo. If the latter I would sympathise and try to show him how to resolve edit conflicts, or better still how to put pressure on the developers to resolve more edit conflicts without biting people. If the former, well as with the GA process it would be hard to sell the community on a change. We have a quality ethos, and I don't see that going any time soon. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:24, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
- After second review, I look forward to the presentation. Geraldshields11 (talk) 01:37, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
- Complaints are like a goldmine, you have to sift out a lot of stuff to get to the paydirt. I don't know whether his dislike of us copy editors is because he would rather not have his typos corrected, or because he has had edit conflicts with us and lost half an hours work because someone corrected a typo. If the latter I would sympathise and try to show him how to resolve edit conflicts, or better still how to put pressure on the developers to resolve more edit conflicts without biting people. If the former, well as with the GA process it would be hard to sell the community on a change. We have a quality ethos, and I don't see that going any time soon. WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:24, 29 March 2014 (UTC)