[WikiEN-l] Preview?

Tue Mar 8 15:21:57 UTC 2005

-------------- Original message -------------- 

> I just clicked on the submit button and it told me I was doing a 
> preview! Yet the revision got through. What's going on? 

The same thing happened to me, I guess I wasn't just seeing things.  These wikipedia death spirals seem to happen when european editing is near its peak, and the USA and Canada start coming online.  Unfortunately,  I bet "traffic" jumps whenever wikipedia stops responding.  I know, I instantly retry again, when I get a server busy or not responding or page unavailable message, in the hopes that I don't lose the thought or edit, that I just laboriously composed (you don't know how SLOWLY  i type).  I bet that is the natural response of a lot of people, and so wikipedia non-responsiveness degenerates into a surge of traffic that exacerbates the discussion.

Unfortunately, sometimes edits do get lost, perhaps the surge in traffic could be avoided if the <submit> button did not make the page go away, but just put up a message, so that it was clear that the edit was still available and could be submitted later.  There would need to be feed back when the edit had gotten through, perhaps the new page could come in then?  Or perhaps a pop-up would notify of acceptance.   Of course <preview> would operate differently, but some assurance mechanism that prevented the edit from being lost there would help too.
             -- Silverback