Help talk:Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface

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.

Report a new bug in Phabricator

You can post in any language here, preferably English or German.

Ik gebruik deze ongevraagd verschijnende mogelijkheid liever niet en beschouw hem dan ook als een vervelend obstakel. JanB46 (talk) 06:03, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

well written matrix .

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 ...

Feature showed my addition with a check and an "X". I clicked the check. I then clicked "Show preview" and nothing happened. I then gave up.

Hey @Danbloch,

we tested the feature on deWiki and it worked. In order to solve your problem, could you please tell me which page you were trying to edit? And if possible also send a link to the diff of the change you were making? We will then try to solve your problem or figure out why it occurs and get back to you.

The page was en:Talk:Millennials. My change was en:Special:Diff/1169104213. The conflicting change was en:Special:Diff/1169102069/1169103055.

These both were additions at the same point in the file, so the conflicting change appeared first on the edit conflict page, followed by my change.

Hello @Danbloch,

thank you for the details and information. We have reconstructed your problem and indeed found that the interface seems to fail scrolling to the preview part when clicking the "Show Preview" button. Many thanks, for your awareness and your comment! We have created a Phabricator ticket to resolve the issue. You can also follow-up the next steps there.

When I use this extension on my wiki, i got such errorlog:

VM2235:956  Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading '$ui')
    at RealtimePreview.isScreenWideEnough (<anonymous>:798:893)
    at <anonymous>:793:1381
    at Object.add (<anonymous>:956:537)
    at realtimepreview/init.js (<anonymous>:793:959)
    at runScript (load.php?lang=zh&modules=startup&only=scripts&raw=1&skin=citizen:12:268)
    at Array.<anonymous> (load.php?lang=zh&modules=startup&only=scripts&raw=1&skin=citizen:12:948)
    at flushCssBuffer (load.php?lang=zh&modules=startup&only=scripts&raw=1&skin=citizen:4:956)

That's an error message from the WikiEditor extension. I can't tell how this is related, sorry. Maybe you need to update that extension first? What was on screen when this error appeared?

Thanks for the reply, but this is the only error I saw when the issue occurred, and nothing seems to be happening on my backend (including the Nginx logs).Besides my wikieditor is already up to date.

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. ~~~~

I from time to time get the Edit Conflict message, but find it to be completely useless. It doesn't tell me whether it will be preserving the other editor's edits and adding mine, or what my choice is. How do I attempt to add my edits while ensuring that the other editor's edits are preserved? It doesn't give me useful information.

~~~~

For me, it gives two source views, like in a diff, and you can analyze the two versions there and pick a version or edit a version to include parts from both. I suck at reading the source code and scanning for what's different, but on bigger edits it is very noticeable.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T329975

Why not do away with all this frustrating BS of edits conflicts?

Allow one active editor at a time to work on an article - period. Set a 15 or 30 minute time limit and warn the active editor when the time limit is about to expire. If the active editor does not save their edits before the expiration, Wikipedia discards the edits and opens the article up to a new editor.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72163

Hey there,

I'm working on a draft page on the English Wikipedia, more specifically a draft for YouTuber JackSucksAtLife. The issue is that it detects an edit conflict, when there was nothing edited for 3 hours. I just opened up the page and edited it, and then it says that there was an edit conflict. I have no more details. Could someone investigate this?

I'm afraid this is a long known issue with the conflict detection in MediaWiki core and nothing that can be fixed in this extension. Sorry.

Issue with the $wgDiff3 configuration.

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.

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.

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.

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?

After several hours of digging deep in the code, I finally figured out was was causing the issue (at least for me). In includes/GlobalFunctions.php.

function wfMerge(
	string $old,
	string $mine,
	string $yours,
	?string &$simplisticMergeAttempt,
	string &$mergeLeftovers = null
): bool {
	global $wgDiff3;

	# This check may also protect against code injection in
	# case of broken installations.
	AtEase::suppressWarnings();
	$haveDiff3 = $wgDiff3 && file_exists( $wgDiff3 );
	AtEase::restoreWarnings();

	if ( !$haveDiff3 ) {
		wfDebug( "diff3 not found" );
		return false;
	}

file_exists ($wgDiff3) always returns false even if the diff3 tool exists and it's path is correctly set. For that matter, it appears that checking if a file exist outside the server directory always fail, so I suspect this is a security feature.

Just commenting out the return false part fixed everything,

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)

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