edit conflicts are a pain especially to newbies. Many common edit conflicts could be avoided with minor changes to MediaWiki.

If the mediawiki software treated adding a new section as not conflicting with editing the final section of a page then many common edit conflicts would become parallel editing.

So currently if the page ends:

blah

I have an idea ** signed ~~~~

and two people want to edit changing it to either :

blah

I have an idea ** signed ~~~~
:breeches NotCensored, NotSocialMedia, iz fattening and possibly licensed to the Illuminati. Do it! ~~~~

Or

blah

I have an idea ** signed ~~~~

Reptilians

OK so per BLP we can't have a category of ''People named by ****" as Reptilians. But how about a hidden category? Wouldn't that make more sense anyway? ~~~~

One of them will have a nasty edit conflict and will either waste some time or be lost forever. But if we changed mediawiki to say that a new section can always be added without edit conflict then we can haz:

blah

I have an idea ** signed ~~~~
:breeches NotCensored, NotSocialMedia, iz fattening and possibly licensed to the Illuminati. Do it! ~~~~

Reptilians

OK so per BLP we can't have a category of ''People named by ****" as Reptilians. But how about a hidden category? Wouldn't that make more sense anyway? ~~~~

If you doubt the value of this do some stats on the number of edit conflicts per day, and their effect on editor retention

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