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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/Make edits auto-recoverable if the editor's network crashes

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Make edits auto-recoverable if the editor's network crashes

  • Problem: An WP edit is lost when the editor's network goes down. Saving in-progress work is a feature in VisualEditor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but not the older wikitext editor
  • Who would benefit: Users of classic wikitext editor who develop a post off-line.
  • Proposed solution: Like GMail, routinely autosave an editor's in-progress work
  • More comments: Again, like GMail, create periodic saved-data (a snapshot of work to date) that can easily take over from the lost data of whatever type (message, article text, etc.)
  • Phabricator tickets: T75241
  • Proposer: BrettA343 (talk) 23:36, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

1) I am curious, in which cases/situations the VisualEditor and the 2017 wiki text editor are able to restore the lost sessions? If I close a browser tab with non-saved edits, and restore, my edits are gone. Unlike by the Reply tool (Discussion Tools). What is the difference?
2) Is T75241 ticket about a different topic? If not, is it resolved already? Samat (talk) 15:56, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
3) How this topic is related the Draft extension? Is it already in use for any of these tools? Samat (talk) 17:52, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Motivation for my questions: request for an auto-save (restore) feature on the local wishlist, and I am not sure how and where to address it here: does it need new development, or only implementation of existing features. Samat (talk) 17:52, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Edits are stored in sessionStorage, which means they should be recovered if you restore the same tab, but not if you reopen the page in a new tab. In order to support that we would need to use localStorage, but that comes with issues around storage limits. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
2) that is the same as this request
3) it isn’t as it stands ESanders (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've boldly clarified the proposal to be about the classic non-VE wikitext editor. Best, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 16:29, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Have been having this problem for a while also. Yes, my edits are stored locally in some cases but in some others it is still able to be lost. The most recent that I remember was some months ago when a user starts editing a page after I started editing it and then they published it before I published mine. My edit was gone completely and I need to start it all over. Often happens by vandals or bots on Wikipedia. It has also happened before when my Internet went down so my edit was not published and when I went back in my browser, it showed the "can't connect" page so my cached edit was lost. RXerself (talk) 00:31, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • On iOS, LocalStorage is limited. I often lose work when a tab reloads in mobile-editor, VE, NWE, etc. But in the classic editor, I get prompted to resubmit the form and can recover to the last preview. Preview early, preview often. This is one of the major factors that keeps me on the classic editor over the alternatives. Pelagic (talk) 09:54, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    The classic mobile editor does not have auto save. We use sessionStorage for VE/NWE. I’m surprised that reloaded tabs in iOS are not recovering. I would file a task about that if you can reproduce it. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 13:58, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting