How often do people actually let edit locks expire?
I've seen this many times editing recap pages of new episodes. I've also seen cases where one troper lets a lock expire, a second troper establishes a lock, makes some quick edits, and submits, then the first troper (perhaps not noticing his/her lock has expired) clicks the submit button, undoing the edits made by the troper who had been locked out before his lock had expired. (Naturally, I typically notice this when I'm the troper who has been waiting for the previous troper to post or for their lock to expire. I think there's a bug in the page coding somewhere; when the lock expires, the submit button should be disabled, forcing the troper to reload before submitting changes.)
At the very least, I think the edit lock expiration bug should be fixed. The Other Wiki's method of handling things does sound better IMHO, but whether it can be implemented on this wiki depends on the underlying software.
The imaginative Christian Asperger
I let the lock expire if I'm trying to fix a particularly big article which can't be fixed within 30 minutes. Pressing "save", then pressing edit again to renew the lock takes a bit of time to do, you know.
Not to mention this being also being a potential problem if someone tries to make consecutive edits while another troper's trying to edit the article as well (especially if they let the edit lock expire in the meantime). Believe me, this happened on VideoGame.The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess, much to the frustrations of at least two parties who were a victim to this.
edited 10th Sep '15 2:44:41 AM by KarjamP
When in doubt, use a text editor.
simple as
Yeah, around 30 seconds with a bad connection
I mean, the way we handle edit collisions isn't ideal (though I don't really like Wikipedia's method, either), but I feel like most problems could be solved by adding something like "Edit locks expire after 30 minutes, which means that submitting an edit that took you longer than that could erase someone else's work. To avoid this, when making large edits either do it in multiple short batches, or write it out in a text editor beforehand." to the edit tips
edited 10th Sep '15 3:47:44 AM by Hylarn
The imaginative Christian Asperger
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Text editors don't solve the problem of potential edit collisions. In fact, it might make things worse if people don't bother paying attention to what other tropers had changed while they were editing the article within the text editor.
And I doubt many people pay attention to those edit tips since people still violate them. And even if they do, only one tip is displayed at a time unless they press the link to "See the full list of editing tips". Which means just like any other editing tips, it's not guaranteed to pop up.
edited 10th Sep '15 5:31:02 AM by KarjamP
...or, y'know, possibly give the "edit lock has expired" thing some teeth, so others' edits aren't inadvertently undone. If edit lock expires, "you no save edits" should be a rule that the page editor enforces on its own; right now it's more of a guideline than a rule. Disabling that "Save" button when the timer expires should be doable.
Doable, but not justifiable. Edit conflicts are not so common as to justify shoving editing into a 20 restriction and discarding one's work if you hit that timepoint.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Is there still interest in this?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Grr... <3
Take a Third Option. Implement region locking instead of page locking. It is a pain to have no choice but to edit the entire page, just to change one paragraph anyway. And yes, it is very important to inform people if the page has been modified since they started editing. Like really important.
That can be done only within 2.0.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Grr... <3
I figured as much.
Wikipedia, AKA The Other Wiki, actually seems to have a method of handling edit collisions that's superior to the way we are currently doing it.
The way we currently do it, is that when a troper clicks on the edit button, the page is locked for 30 minutes just so that a troper have enough time to add what they want to add to our trope page. If the page lock expires, we would risk an "edit collusion", a phenomenon where a second troper accidentally overrides the edits of the first one, causing huge headaches.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, has no edit lock. The way it handles edit collisions, however, is different: Once you press "save", if Wikipedia detects that someone else changed the article while you were still editing, it will ignore your edit, send you back to the edit page, then notify you of the edit someone else had made.
As Wikipedia's method of handling edit collisions seems to significantly lower the risk of it being a problem, I suggest that we switch to their method of handling them.