Last modified: 2005-10-16 15:19:02 UTC
I have had a few complaints lately about the bot making 'wrong' edits to pages. It appears that there are cases where the bot can revert the edit by someone else. More specifically, what seems to be going on is this: Someone is running the bot twice, and gets the following: * Bot (run 1) reads the page * Bot (run 2) reads the page * Someone else makes an edit on the page * Bot (run 1) saves the page * Bot (run 2) saves the page What happens now is that when the first bot saves the page, the bot's edit and the other edit are seen to be in conflict, and the edit conflict is resolved correctly, the two edits being merged. But when the *second* bot saves the same page, there is no edit conflict seen, and the second bot's version is saved unchanged - with the usually unwanted effect of reverting the other person's edit. Apparently, whatever module is checking for edit conflicts, does not ring a bell when the last edit was made by the same user, even if the user is still basing his edit on an old version which thereby conflicts with an edit of another user. Could this be corrected?
Can you confirm this making the edits manually? (Use three browsers, or three computers.) Can you confirm that both bots are using separate user accounts? (If they are using the same user account, then this is expected behavior as you can overwrite your own last edit by hitting 'back', except with section edits where this has been disabled.)
1. See the history of http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker:Andre_Engels/Test 2. The 2 bots are not separate user accounts. However, this may be expected behavior, but is it wanted behavior? Overwriting your own edits this way should be okay, but the bug is that you are overwriting *other people's edits* that were in an automatically resolved edit conflict with your first edit. I don't see that as wanted behaviour. Suppose I load an edit page, and make a change on it, while in the meantime someone else has edited the page elsewhere. Then I hit back, and edit again. It seems reasonable that that is not considered an edit conflict with myself, but now it is not considered an edit conflict at all, also not with the other person - which means that his edit is lost.
As Andre's comment there says, this is the same issue as bug 1150, which contains much discussion. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1150 ***
