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.


CategoryUsabilityObservation

MoinMoin: UsabilityObservation/UserConfusedBySaveConflict (last edited 2007-10-29 19:08:59 by localhost)