Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Auto-save feature in Visual Editor and WikiText Editor

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Auto-save feature in Visual Editor and WikiText Editor

  • Problem: We have nice new editor surfaces, like Visual Editor and WikiText Editor 2017, which are planned to use as default in the future. But unlike the old editors, the new ones lose the not-yet-saved content in case of a browser/system crash or an accidentally closed tab. We should offer a function to save the session data, at least as well as it worked until now.
  • Who would benefit: every editors
  • Proposed solution: Implement a kind of auto-save feature for VE (see the ticket)
  • More comments:

Discussion[edit]

Other duplicated Phabricator tickets: T169965, T175489 etc. Samat (talk) 15:54, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Same in Flow: T139804 (Note that Phabricator and ContentTranslation already have autosave so the common objection that this would result in evil users storing illegal things in the drafts and causing liability is moot.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This is basic functionality, and should have been available from the start. There are various browser-level workarounds , but it should be a basic facility. DGG (talk) 02:16, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think it is critical to make sure the autosaved data truly is wiped out quickly. I mean, suppose an editor wants to use Wikipedia as his alibi after he is framed for murder. Well, right now, everyone in the courtroom can see when his account made edits without having to leave their seats. But if you do this, then his lawyers may be serving you with a subpoena saying show us the files that indicate he was steadily working on the text in between those times. Wikipedia doesn't want a subpoena -- not even when it might help to show innocence, and definitely not in the more likely nefarious case where a public or private censor is arguing in criminal or civil court that an editor was involved in posting something that mere peasants shouldn't be saying. Wnt (talk) 22:03, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]