When editing this Wiki [TESTSTATION] Spielplatz - Teste alle Funktionen des Forums, me and another user added changes quite quickly one after the other. In the editing history of the post some of the other user’s typing is shown as mine.
In a second edit we entered our names to the lines we wrote, to make the authorship more clear. When looking into that and the history you might be able to understand even if you don’t understand German.
I guess that doesn’t happen very often - but if it does, it’s quite annoying.
( I closed the Wiki so there won’t be many more changes - makes it easier to read the history.)
Edit: With another wiki that didn’t happen, even though the changes were done quickly (less than 5 mins)
This is tricky for me to reproduce on demand, but I suspect it comes from doing concurrent edits. In other words, it’s not that they were done very close to each other, but rather that 2 people were editing the same text.
Initially, two people start to edit the same revision of the text — from there, who submits first gets their changes correctly, but what happens to the second (still ongoing) edit, which started from an older version of the text, when it is submitted? This is a problem specially if the two people editing the same parts (lines) of the initial text.
There’s no correct solution to this (other than perhaps force the 2nd person to abort their edit which would be even more annoying). When the 2nd person submits their own changes, the software may see the changes as reverting what the 1st person wrote, since they are not part of that person’s edit, but they are in the most recent version of the text.
I honestly don’t know how it is implemented in practice, but I suspect this behavior is coming from these concurrent edits problem which is an limitation of wikis. Only something closer to real-time (like a Google Doc, although that is even more complex to handle) can avoid this oddities.
It is a bit strange that the authorship gets confused… but it still maybe a better option than having edits being lost?
Thanks for your reply.
That might be an explanation to what’s happened.
Even though I’m quite sure that we posted right after another - at some point we began to test.
Once Summsebine got a system information that she couldn’t edit the wiki because someone else was editing it, though.
Maybe the forum was very busy at that time and something went wrong because of that?
As long as this doesn’t happen more often, there’s no need to go much deeper into it
