Is there any technical means by which the wiki software can be made to deal with edit conflict issues? By this, I mean the following situation:
1) Alice opens a page for editing and starts making changes.
2) Bob opens the same page for editing and also starts making changes.
3) Bob finishes quickly and presses 'Save Page' to save his edited version of the page.
4) At some later time, Alice finishes editting presses 'Save Page' to save her edited version, wiping out Bob's changes.
The root cause of this problem is that both users had the same version of the page as their starting point. Because of this, they each have produced their own fork of the page, and as the second user to save, Alice's changes will wipe out Bob's changes. Wikipedia has some
clever wizardry that deals with this sort of thing, but a brief test I did just now on my own page suggests that this wiki has nothing equivalent.
Right now, this isn't too much of a problem, because all the editing is being spread out over a wide selection of pages, but it's going to become more and more serious as time goes on and the number of people left in the competition gets smaller, because the editing will get focussed on an increasingly small set of user pages.
In an ideal world, the solution would be if everyone to checked the page they are editing for changes immediately before they save their changes, but there will always be people who forget, and it's hard to get the message out to the userbase at large. Another interim solution would be to encourage people to put a little note at the bottom of any page they are editing, so other users are aware of the fact. Again, not ideal.
The ideal solution would be technical, and so depends on whoever is acting as Admins for this wiki. I don't know how hard such a solution would be to implement, but I suspect it is going to be sorely needed by the end of GDS.
