This card tracks a proposal that's currently part of the Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
The Wishlist Survey voting phase lasts until Dec 14th. After the voting has concluded, the top proposals will form the backlog for the Community Tech team to investigate and address.
See also {T72163}, which may overlap/duplicate.
**Proposal**:
We all get edit conflicts, those of us who have stayed on wikipedia are largely those who have learned to resolve them, or to do lots of little edits in order to minimise the time lost when we get an edit conflict. There have been many proposals on bugzilla and elsewhere to reduce edit conflicts, but they haven't had resource as keeping new editors didn't use to be a priority. But this is one of the things that new editors find most bitey about wikipedia, and usually it is the newbie who loses the edit conflict because they are taking minutes on their edit and the categoriser or templater only seconds. (V/e of course makes this worse by getting rid of section editing and slowing editors down.
Currently we don't even have public statistics on number of editors lost through edit conflicts. Simply measuring them and the number of times they predict an editor leaves would either confirm this was one of the biggest causes of good new editors leaving, but actually fixing some of the things that cause edit conflicts would likely take as little resource.
Getting rid of all edit conflicts would require a revolutionary change in the user interface, but halving edit conflicts would take a fairly minor investment.
Specific ways to reduce edit conflicts include:
-- Treat the addition of a template at the top of an article or a category at the end as not conflicting with the alteration of the contents in between.
-- Pre populate all newly created articles with sections such as ==References== and ==See also== or equivalents in other languages
-- Treat # the same as a section heading so two replies in two different threads of the same section would not be treated as a conflict.
WereSpielChequers (talk) 20:54, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Editing#Halve_edit_conflicts