Talk:Community Wishlist/W20

Thank you!

@Closed Limelike Curves thanks for sharing this wish. Which editor are you using, the visual or source editor? Both editors have capabilities to save edits in "draft," and I'm curious specifically what you'd like to see that's different. Are there any images you can share, or links to articles where a more robust "draft mode" would be helpful? Thanks! JWheeler-WMF (talk) 02:37, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I use both visual or source editor. Generally, I'd just like it if drafts were automatically saved somewhere, so that I wouldn't lose my progress if e.g. I had a browser crash. I'd also like to have multiple previous versions that I can look back over.

The current draft-saving functionality is quite fragile (I've had several times where it fails and I lose hours of work). Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 02:29, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

@Closed Limelike Curves

Thank you for your wish!

Auto-save is already implemented, but what do you mean it's quite fragile and that you have lost hours of work before? Is this still reproducible? MikeZ-WMF (talk) 11:52, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

It's still flaky for me (and some friends I've talked to about this agree and say you should avoid the visual editor, especially for long changes), but I haven't been able to identify what precisely triggers it. One guess I have is this happens if I try and edit the same article in multiple tabs. This is very common for me, since sometimes I'll start making an edit, then try to break it up into a few smaller edits (e.g. I might be adding several sentences to a paragraph, but then notice it has a typo that I want to correct in its own minor edit). To me it feels like it's happening, even if I don't do this, but I'm not sure.

A more-robust implementation might be to have all versions of automatically saved every time I add more than, say, 100 characters. Then instead of having "discard" destroy the draft permanently, it would behave more like stashing changes in git (so I can come back to them later by picking a draft from a menu). —Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 18:14, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional context - we'll see if we can put some numbers on the flakiness such as checking logs to quantify somehow, and so what sort of tradeoffs (e.g. costs, policies for saving more drafts/data) we need to consider. MikeZ-WMF (talk) 10:18, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

I've since confirmed that I lose data if I try to do the following (common) workflow:

1. Start an edit in one tab,

2. Start a different edit in another tab (usually to split the first edit into smaller chunks, but maybe I just forgot about the first tab),

3. Publish the second edit.

I think this is probably the biggest source of flakiness. A manual "stash my changes" button and a menu to pick between versions (which can be saved locally) should work for this. —Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 19:15, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

How is this different from mw:Edit Recovery?

* Pppery * _{it has begun} 20:17, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

@Closed Limelike Curves: I think this part is solved with Edit Recovery: Generally, I'd just like it if drafts were automatically saved somewhere, so that I wouldn't lose my progress if e.g. I had a browser crash. What Edit Recovery does not do is save the text multiple times where you can select an earlier version. However, I don't think that's a good idea or needed because that's what the page revision history is for – just save it and then continue working on it. Additionally, I don't know why one would like to restore an earlier version of a draft. Maybe it would be best to archive this or something. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:48, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

The issue with saving is sometimes my edits are incomplete and not ready to publish, but still contain useful nuggets. I suspect this just comes down to how different people tend to edit. I'm like the opposite of a wikignome, where most of my edits (weighted by content) are huge and involve reworking large parts of an article. —Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 18:04, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

It's similar for me and I don't understand when people ask to slice up large edits into a flood of separate edits instead of a large holistic one or two (e.g. easier to check the diff and better workflow). However, your reply doesn't really answer my question as far as I understand it: 1) are you asking for some revision history of unsaved edits and if so why (I doubt there's a reasonable case there could be made for such) 2) if not, does the new Edit Recovery feature solve your issue? Prototyperspective (talk) 23:52, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, though I'm not sure why the case couldn't be made for it, since this is standard/basic functionality for most office suites and document editors nowadays.

Edit recovery is already an improvement, but isn't robust enough for big edits (I can't use it to save a version of a page that I'm editing across multiple sittings and then come back to it later). —Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 05:01, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

One aspect of this wish that is perhaps making things less clear is that it's about source editing and VisualEditor, and those two have different ways of handling in-progress storing of edits. For the source editor, edit recovery is used, which saves only the current state of the editing form into the browser's indexedDB. VE on the other hand saves it to the browser's session storage, which is discarded when a tab is closed. Neither store multiple versions of a draft, and neither are intended to be long-term safe storage of anything. I think this wish should be changed to be focused on some more specifics: e.g. adding more history to edit recovery, or making VE use more persistent storage. One thing to keep in mind is that when we built edit recovery the discussions were pretty clear about it not becoming a general purpose 'drafts' feature. As in: it shouldn't be the way that people write a wiki page over multiple sittings before publishing — that should be done via separate pages in the Draft or User namespace, where the content and all intermediate edits are public. Other possibilities could be: the addition of a 'save and keep editing' button, so the page could be saved but editing could continue uninterupted; or more convenient ways to start a new draft under a user page based on the current version of a mainspace page. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 06:04, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

One aspect of this wish that is perhaps making things less clear is that it's about source editing and VisualEditor, and those two have different ways of handling in-progress storing of edits.

That seems like a very unintuitive design, and like the two of them should probably be unified.

VE on the other hand saves it to the browser's session storage, which is discarded when a tab is closed.

That explains why it doesn't work consistently for me when the browser crashes. What's the point of it, then?

As in: it shouldn't be the way that people write a wiki page over multiple sittings before publishing — that should be done via separate pages in the Draft or User namespace, where the content and all intermediate edits are public.

A "save draft to userspace" button would be amazing and solve 90% of my problems with the current system. —Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 21:40, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

@Closed Limelike Curves: It is unintuitive, yep! But it's hopefully going to be rectified at some point. I'm not sure when of course! The point of the session storage is to preserve the edit data when you accidentally navigate away from the page. It and edit recovery are very much safeguards rather than things that should be relied upon for longer-term draft storage. But it sounds like for what you want, a different approach would be better, one that's designed for managing user-space drafts (saving text to them, and notifying you when you've got a draft underway, and perhaps making it easy to merge changes from the article into the draft). SWilson (WMF) (talk) 04:41, 19 December 2025 (UTC)