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Edit conflict not detected, middle edit reverted
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Description

Author: orlady

Description:
An edit conflict should have been registered in the following sequence, but the second edit was saved anyway:

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pensacola_Christian_College&diff=170548221&oldid=170540650 - User Zach4636 "undid" an edit made about 1 hour earlier.
  1. Before the above edit was saved, User Orlady had opened an edit window for the same article in order to remove a user's signature from the first line of the article. (This signature was part of the same edit that Zach4636 undid.) The edit was submitted two minutes later -- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pensacola_Christian_College&diff=next&oldid=170548221 -- but it had the effect of restoring most of the content that Zach4646's edit had deleted.

An edit conflict should have been registered, preventing the second edit from being saved in this way.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56849
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67745

Details

Reference
bz11922

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 9:56 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz11922.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

furrykef wrote:

I notice a similar problem when editing the same page using multiple tabs. If you edit individual sections, the behavior is correct -- edits are merged properly if the sections don't overlap, and they yield a conflict if they do -- but if instead the two tabs are editing the entire page rather than individual sections, the second edit will silently undo the first.

onionleather wrote:

Had the same problem today. Curiously on the edit conflict page. I was saving my edit on the conflict page and had overwritten a comment from another user, which he had written meanwhile.

See also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4745#c12

orlady wrote:

This has cropped up again since the new version of MediaWiki was installed. At
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Edit_conflicts_not_being_detected I have described two occurrences in two days of unflagged edit conflicts. In both instances in which edit conflicts were not registered, one user was editing a page section and the other user was editing the entire page.

  • Bug 22992 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I am restoring the priority of this to normal. A bug that destroys the edits of others, potentially driving away new editors, cannot possibly be low priority. According to the definitions, that means just sitting around until someone is kind enough to offer a patch. IMHO, it should be an even higher priority.

As long as nobody investigates and manages to track down criteria or situation to reproduce, it will de facto be low priority, no matter what it should be. :-/

Do you need more examples of the error? What else can people do from the user side to help?

(In reply to Spinningspark from comment #7)

Do you need more examples of the error? What else can people do from the
user side to help?

Adam (CC'ed): You worked on bug 56849 (edit conflict detection) a while ago; maybe you could provide some input if there's anything / way users can help here?

furrykef wrote:

I notice a similar problem when editing the same page using multiple tabs. If you edit individual sections, the behavior is correct -- edits are merged properly if the sections don't overlap, and they yield a conflict if they do -- but if instead the two tabs are editing the entire page rather than individual sections, the second edit will silently undo the first.

This is a "feature": self-conflicts are ignored. See T175745: Do not overwrite edits when conflicting with self.