636420 - When someone opens a SUMO KB article in edit mode, notify this to other users

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, task)

Description

[Underpass]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; it; rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110218 Firefox/3.6.14
Build Identifier: 

A good feature we lost is the locking of articles when someone opens them in edit mode. In TikiWiki, when this happened, everyone else got a message saying 

"This article is currently being modified by <username>"

Often we happen to change the same article in the same time and the restore of this feature would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

An even better solution would b

Comment 2

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Just disregard my last comment please. I only wanted to change the status of the bug.

Comment 3

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

It's not necessary to lock as two edits at the same time will simply result in two different revisions in the history--i.e. nothing will ever be "overwritten." (It is up to a user to manually merge the two revisions, since this is a wiki, not git.)

How often do simultaneous edits to the same article actually happen?

Comment 4

[Underpass]

The aim is only to avoid consuming localizers' time.
In recent times I often started to work on a translation after receiving a notification, and found that my fellows localizers did the same :)

Comment 5

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

I understand, but we have a pretty long list of development tasks as it is, so knowing how big of a problem this is will help us triage and prioritize.

Comment 6

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

James, the merging thing is not too useful for localizers, usually they will update an article and do the same work twice. 

I guess a complete solution for this problem would take too much time, how about a quick and dirty one? If a second person starts to edit the same article within an hour, show a message to the secon editor that "($user) has started to edit the article ($minutes) ago". When I think about it, it's probably not so quick either, hmm.

Comment 7

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

You'd need to track all started edits within an hour, and check against that list everytime someone click on "edit/translate"

Comment 8

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> You'd need to track all started edits within an hour, and check against that
> list everytime someone click on "edit/translate"

Yes, it's not simple or quick at all. That's why I'm trying to get a sense of the impact.

Comment 9

[Michele Rodaro [michro]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> How often do simultaneous edits to the same article actually happen?

Hi James,
Last time yesterday. I was editing simultaneously with Simone (I couldn't know) and after submitting my edit I discovered that the edit was already done. So I had to reject my edit. Wasted time for nothing :)

Usually we coordinate ourselves with a message in a special section on Mozilla Italia forum, but expecially if an edit is very simple and fast, after receiving a notification, we do it immediately without telling each other.

I believe that, before starting his edit, it's important for a localizer to be warned if another localizer is editing simultaneously.
I understand perfectly well that it's not simple at all ;)

Comment 10

[Vincent (caméléon)]

it just happened to me too, so +1 for that bug, even if it is not a big priority...

Comment 12

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

We fixed this in another bug. Closing as works for me.