From a wiki on wiki:
Avoid edit conflicts
Wikis often involve simultaneous editing by many people, and the MediaWiki software used by Grokdoc has only limited capabilities for merging simultaneous changes. If you aren't careful, you can accidentally revert other people's hard work by committing changes to an obsolete version of the document. To minimize these edit conflicts, obey the following guidelines whenever possible:
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Use many small edits, rather than a few major edits. The longer you spend editing the document without saving your changes, the greater the chance of an edit conflict.
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Edit individual sections or subsections whenever possible, as opposed to editing the whole document or a large section at once. There is no conflict if two editors work on disjoint sections simultaneously. If you need to edit several sections, consider breaking your edit up into several smaller edits.
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Make multi-section edits quickly: if you do have to edit multiple sections at once, for example to move a section from one place to another or to do a global search-and-replace, do it quickly and don't mix it with other edits. This will minimize the probability of a conflict. - For example, if you want to move a section from one place to another, it should take only a few seconds.
- To do a global search-and-replace should also take only a few seconds: open the page for editing, copy to another editor that supports search-and-replace, do the replace, then paste back (to the same window not a new edit session) and save.
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Don't ignore edit conflict warnings. If you do have an edit conflict, the MediaWiki software should warn you. Don't ignore this and paste over your changes; use the history to see what has changed and merge it in, or make your changes again to the latest version if they are quick.
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Don't edit elsewhere, then save as a new edit session. Wikis assume that when you start a new edit session, that you started with the text it sent. Admins of MediaWiki-based sites might want to edit the page MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning to include this text (which is displayed in every edit): "DO NOT copy the text elsewhere, edit it, start a new editing session, and paste that edited text back into the new editing session. Starting a new editing session this way can erase other people's work."
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As a last resort, request that an admin lock the page temporarily. And, of course, discuss such a major change in Talk.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)
