Edit conflict

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For back-and-forth disagreements in wiki editing, see Edit war.
For dealing with edit conflicts on English Wikipedia, see Help:Edit conflict.
A representation of an edit conflict. To resolve the conflict, the goat lover must choose whether to keep their changes or merge them with the cat lover's.

An edit conflict is a computer problem that may occur when multiple editors edit the same

file
and cannot merge without losing part or all of their edit. The conflict occurs when an editor gets a copy of a shared document file, changes the copy, and attempts to save the changes to the original file, which has been altered by another editor after the copy was obtained.

Resolution

The simplest way to resolve an edit conflict is to ignore intervening edits and overwrite the current file. This may lead to a substantial loss of information, and alternative methods are often employed to resolve or prevent conflicts:

  • Manual resolution, where the editor determines which version to retain and may manually incorporate edits into the current version of the file.
  • Store backups or file comparisons of each edit, so there are the previous versions of the file can still be accessed once the original is overwritten.
  • File locking, which limits the file to one editor at a time to prevent edit conflicts. Computer writer Gary B. Shelly notes that many wiki systems "will block the contributor who is attempting to edit the page from being able to do so until the contributor currently editing the page saves changes or remains idle on the page for an extended period of time."[1]
  • Merge, by determining if the edits are in unrelated parts of the file and combining without user intervention.

Occurrences

The problem is encountered on heavily edited articles in

copyediting can be done directly on the newer version, and then saved.[2]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-1-4390-4802-3. Archived
    from the original on 2023-03-18. Retrieved 2020-12-10.
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-596-51516-4
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-470-39678-0. Archived
    from the original on 2023-03-18. Retrieved 2020-12-10.
  4. ^ Michael Antonovich (2010). Office and SharePoint 2010 User's Guide: Integrating SharePoint. p. 321 (752 pages), quote: "Edit conflict on a list linked to SharePoint".
  5. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3
    . Edit conflict.
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