User confused by Save Conflict error message
Observation
When a page is very active, Inexperienced users become very frustrated when their saves fail.
Example incident captured in internal irc log :
<H> whoever is trashing my entries in the wiki page - stop f....ing doing it <N> When you click "Save" it will come up with a green box telling you if someone saved in between your load and save of the page. If so, then cut and paste your changes into a new instance of the EditText for the page. <D> it helps to make quick changes... add 2-3 lines, hit save... repeat.. <D> if you leave the page open for 10 mins making changes, you WILL lose them <H> Who came up with that stupid system - some tard
Task
Save changes to a page that's being heavily and rapidly edited.
Users
Users inexperienced with wikis, more used to client-side single-user applications
Context
Observed in office.
Discussion
Wikis need a much more automated merging tool, like our dev environments already use. 9 times out of 10, we use wikis for many people to accumulate a list, so they invariably add lines. These are (should be) trivial to merge, and if a trivial merge is possible, it should be done automatically.
MoinMoin already uses a diff3 algorithm for merging.
You can also configure MoinMoin to do locking.
You get a nice merge when you have a conflict, you don't loose anything or "can't save" like it happen in other wiki engines. Try to describe in much more detail the specific situation.
- Stupid users can not handle this. I would suggest the following:
if a conflict exists the user is shown only the parts that are different. A user should be able to choose "Dump my additions" or "dump the additions by the other user". If we have section editing we could save both edits but show the user that another user has added something, too. He then could say: "that's ok, leave editor" or have the option to go back to editing mode. -- ThiloPfennig 2006-01-20 17:02:28