Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Advanced diff algorithm and wikitext delimiter pseudosectioning for reducing edit conflicts

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Advanced diff algorithm and wikitext delimiter pseudosectioning for reducing edit conflicts

  • Problem: Edit conflicts remain a source of frustration for experienced and new editors alike, especially on articles where interest is high and editing is rapid.
  • Who would benefit: Editors of heavily edited articles.
  • Proposed solution: Employ a more sophisticated diff algorithm which is less likely to signal an edit conflict when two edits can be automatically merged.
  • More comments: Creating pseudo-sections from the beginning and ending of wikitext delimiters such as template transclusion braces is very likely to help with the existing algorithm designed to avoid edit conflicts across sections.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

@James Salsman: Just to clarify, you're suggesting improving the algorithm for automatically merging edits (and avoiding manual merging), not allowing more granular editing of articles, right? In other words, your "pseudosections" are just a parsing strategy, not a user interface change. right? Kaldari (talk) 19:18, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. The edit submission diff algorithm merges changes to different sections (which don't change the number of sections) to avoid edit conflicts when multiple people edit the same page simultaneously. It's a great feature and has plenty of room for improvement in terms of avoiding edit conflicts when people edit the same section simultaneously. One of the ways to accomplish the general case is to use parsing features as input to the diff algorithm, but it's not strictly necessary to do it that way. It's not a UI change, just a more pleasant UX under the same UI. James Salsman (talk) 08:56, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]