I know that conflicts get suppressed for section=new edits (you can just append to the end of the page, doesn't matter if the page changed in the meantime), so the reverse situation (you submit first, then the section=new user submits) should be handled gracefully. I think this use case is trickier to handle right.

• Bug 34580 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This is not a dupe of the other.

Steps to reproduce:

• User A opens the last section of a page for edit
• User B adds a section with section=new to the same page
• User A pressed save and get a edit conflict against the text/section added by user B

When User A would edit another section except the last one, you would not get a edit conflict, because mediawiki can merge it (with wgDiff3 or so), but mediawiki cannot merge, when the old text and the new text has differences at the end.

bswanberg77 wrote:

When 2 users run section=new within a minute of each other, then the 2nd new section sometimes "overwrites" the 1st new section. The result seems to be 2 different updates to the prior (base) revision, rather than a series of 2 updates, in tandem. I think the option for "section=new" must issue a read-lock of the page, then append and unlock, to let the 2nd editor read-lock, append and unlock the page as appending to the lastest prior revision, ensured by a read-lock, or semaphore lock, until each "section=new" is completed.

(In reply to comment #4)

When 2 users run section=new within a minute of each other, then the 2nd new
section sometimes "overwrites" the 1st new section. The result seems to be 2
different updates to the prior (base) revision, rather than a series of 2
updates, in tandem. I think the option for "section=new" must issue a
read-lock

of the page, then append and unlock, to let the 2nd editor

read-lock, append

and unlock the page as appending to the lastest prior

revision, ensured by a

read-lock, or semaphore lock, until each

"section=new" is completed.

There is no problem, when two users using section=new and append a new section to the end of the text

• Bug 52197 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I've been seeing this with increased frequency lately. There really should be no edit conflict between someone editing an existing section on the page and someone adding a new section.

I wonder if the end of a section is defined only by the start of a following section. As the last section on a page has no following section it therefore includes all the rest of a page. If the end of the last section of the page was given a defined end and a new section added content after this defined end rather than simply after the last content then this sort of edit conflict would not occur.

Is this a task that could be handled by WMDE devs who developed the "Two-Column-Edit-Conflict-Merge"?