Why should it cause an edit conflict? The changes made in the null edit will be reverted by the next edit, but that doesn't matter, since changes made in a null edit don't change what the page looks like.

If the protection level of a page is increased after the user opened the edit form, the editor gets no warning that he's modifying a now-protected page.

(In reply to comment #2)

If the protection level of a page is increased after the user opened the edit
form, the editor gets no warning that he's modifying a now-protected page.

So everyone can (if the timing is right) make a null edit to a protected page. So what? As I said before, null edits don't change the way the page is rendered (sent to the browser), so it doesn't really matter whether you're allowed to edit the page or not: apart from an entry in the page history, you're not changing anything.

ayg wrote:

I would agree that you should get a warning if the page has been protected since you started editing, like we have if it's been deleted, but this is a roundabout way of doing it. I'd suggest you open a request asking for the desired feature directly. "Edit conflicts" are meant to record, in fact, conflicts between successive edits, and won't even pop up if the changes are substantive provided they're to different lines. This is by design.

To clarify -- this *will* trigger an edit conflict, but the conflict will be automatically suppressed by the conflict merging, because there are no conflicting changes.

Since there are no conflicting changes, no user-visible warning is required or shown.

So everyone can (if the timing is right) make a null edit to a protected page.

No, only if he has permission to edit protected pages.

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