Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Dealing with an Edit Conflict

Some articles are very (temporarily or permanently) popular with editors—perhaps the article is about a current event (say, a hurricane) or a person suddenly in the news. Such articles may be edited as frequently as once every minute or two. For such an article, if you as an editor take a while to do an edit—say, you begin editing, then do something else for five minutes, then come back to editing—your chances of an edit conflict are quite high when you attempt to save your edit.

If there is an edit conflict, the Wikipedia screen has four parts:

• The warning at the top (Figure 1-8).

• A text box with the text for the current version of the page. It’s Wikipedia saying “Here’s what you can edit—the current version,” plus all the other editing stuff (edit summary box, buttons, wiki markup symbols, and so on.)

• A Differences section that shows how your version (the one you saw in “show preview”) now differs from the existing page (the one revised by someone else while you were working on your revision).

• At the very bottom, an additional text edit box, with your edit in it (Figure 1-9).

Figure 1-9. When there is an edit conflict, your screen will have an additional edit box, at the bottom of the screen, with the label “Your text.” (Not all the text in Figure 1-4 is shown here, but all of it would be in the edit box.)

The best way to handle an edit conflict depends on ...