Last modified: 2014-02-17 19:12:20 UTC
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Dummy_edit#Null_edit says "... and the edit summary is discarded." The user types his valuable comments into the summary box. The save completes as if all is well. And his comments have been thrown away without even the least warning. He tries again. All seems to proceed well, but he is at a loss why his summary doesn't appear anywhere. It's as if he was only just dreaming he hit Save Page. He concludes there must be a bug: if there is a zero difference in the text, there must be some divison by zero causing the program to not process his subission, but return sucessfully as if it did. Little does he know that what he was doing was the insider's way of purging a page, and it is even documented that his summary was to be thrown away. He walks away saddened that there must be a bug.
Resolving this as WONTFIX. Edit summaries serve to describe what changes occurred on a particular page. If no changes occurred, MediaWiki doesn't add a revision, and nothing can be described in an edit summary. If a user wishes to discuss the page, they can use the talk page. If a user simply wants to expand upon their previous edit summary, there are separate bugs filed about expanding the size of the edit summary field. If a user simply wants to clarify an error or omission from their previous edit summary, there are separate bugs filed about being able to correct one's own edit summaries (esp. if it is the most recent edit to the page). There doesn't seem to be anything actionable here.
Bad error reporting, counterintuitive behaviour. Looks like there's plenty here to fix.
Just to have a kind of brainstorming place: -possibility: JS hack via anchor, if nulledit is detected, redirect as normal but with #nulledit at url end and display some static message via JS-hidden DIV tag - con: requirement to ship the fucking text at EVERY page view -making it dynamically won't work on wikipedia for anon users, as every page view of them goes through squid :(
(In reply to comment #3) > Just to have a kind of brainstorming place: > -possibility: JS hack via anchor, if nulledit is detected, redirect as normal > but with #nulledit at url end and display some static message via JS-hidden DIV > tag > - con: requirement to ship the fucking text at EVERY page view > > -making it dynamically won't work on wikipedia for anon users, as every page > view of them goes through squid :( Making it work "dynamically" by altering the HTML of the article page would work just fine, for the same reason that anonymous edits work just fine. A null edit starts a session. There's no need for any JS hack. There are a number of other solutions which would also work.
Something simple at the top of the page like: "Your edit was NOT made. If you wish to recover the changed text and/or edit summary, use you browsers BACK button. If you wish to try make the edit again go BACK once more, refresh and choose the same edit option again if it is still available. NB There was a reason why to edit was not made." with the first sentence in red. The last sentence can be updated to actually explain why the edit wasn't made (null edit, etc) if and when it is known, and you have time to do it. The notification of a change not made is the import thing. The best example is anti-vandal fighting. Bots and people are likely to make identical edits and, with the feature of Rollback jumping to the user's contributions, you don't notice it wasn't your change that fixed the problem at all. (Of course it normally doesn't matter who adds the {{subst:uw}} to the user's talk page, but it would save time when otherwise a conflict or two {{uw}]s eventually occur.)
With PostEdit (with 1.22 part of core) a message is shown, when the edit was saved and no message is set for null edits. Maybe this is fixed the other way round and no message is needed.
FIXED per comment 6
I would still prefer an actual "No edit was saved" message rather than just the absence of a message.
Okay, than I will leave this open for discussion.
