GIST Support WikiThis page discusses edit conflicts, and how to deal with them. An edit conflict occurs when two people try to edit the same page at the same time. The following example helps illustrate the problem:
- Alice clicks "Edit this page" on a page.
- Bob clicks "Edit this page" on the same page.
- Alice finishes her edits and clicks "Save page". The page is saved with Alice's version.
- Bob finished his edits and clicks "Save page". Bob gets an "edit conflict" page.
The following section describes the edit conflict page and what Bob needs to do to make sure nobody's edits were lost.
[edit] Layout of the edit conflict page
At the top of the edit conflict page is Alice's version of the whole page.
At the bottom of the edit conflict page is the text Bob was going to submit. This will be Bob's entire version of the page, if he edited the entire page, or Bob's version of the section he edited, if he was editing just one section.
In the middle is a diff of both versions.
[edit] Resolving an edit conflict
Bob will need to look at both versions and manually copy and paste edits from one into the other. For example, if Bob only made small changes, and Alice made large changes, he may choose to add his changes to Alice's version. If it was the other way around, he could add Alice's edits to his version.
Once he is done combining the versions, he should add an edit summary that says "via edit link" (so that others know he manually merged the versions). He should then save the version that was updated.
Important Note: This process sometimes has problems when editing sections (rather than the entire page). Specifically, it can lead to content being duplicated on the page. If you are in Bob's situation and you have only edited a section, you may want to just copy your edited section, save Alice's version on the edit conflict page, edit the page again, paste in your section and merge any edits with the existing version if necessary.