Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Edit-recovery feature

Investigations and your input

The CommTech team is reviewing any investigations, discussions, patches that have happened around this wish to determine what is next.

We have would like you to answer some questions as follows:

• How long do we need to save the data for the auto-save functionality (Keeping in mind legal matters, as legal implications are reduced by reducing the amount of time we store edits)?

• What should we store in the database to be able to make autosave functionality work? I.e:
  • Edits
  • Revisions
  • Pages
  • Text

Please leave your responses on this talkpage if you have any. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 15:51, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

My hope was to leverage the existing stashed edits infrastructure, but increase the TTL (time to live) so that it persists for say, 10, maybe even 30 minutes. This avoids the issues of using localStorage (which can't hold but so much data), and also legal implications as the TTL is so short, and sessions are not sharable.

Another idea is to have longer-term storage in a database table (no longer than 90 days, as per legal recommendation), but provide a way for the content to be moderated. This is nice because your unsaved edit can be recovered across different devices. I am still however concerned about this especially with all the opposition we saw on the private sandbox wish.

So in addition to the above, my questions for voters of this wish are:

• What is more important to you -- recovering edits similar to how VisualEditor works, or saving "drafts" per-se, provided we address legal/moderation concerns?
• Do you want to be able to recover edits across different devices?

MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

In context of an auto-save feature that would endure a browser crash, with single interrupted edit (assuming it's stored on the client side).

• How long: until one restart the browser and is recognized as logged in - show notification/alert/popup with a question if one want to continue editing or remove saved edit. If it's not a browser crash, then the same amount as current recovery solution.
• What to store: I don't know what any of the options means exactly, but it should definitely keep the changes that the user did (mostly in the VE, in my case). So I guess it's the Text (diff against the unmodified article), so even if there was let's say a restoration problem, you could still copy the saved text.
• When to auto-save: on switching between editor modes, on preview, when there's a significant number of new changes made (or if the out of memory is detected - my specific case).
• What is more important: I guess the easiest one to implement (that survives the browser crash)?
• Recover edits across devices: Doesn't matter to me.

Other notes: For my needs the "auto-save" could probably be a prompt to periodically ask to save current progress / make copy as a local text file, or as a draft or sandbox if saved online (probably as a special page, that would suppress some features like ex. adding page to categories). MarMi wiki (talk) 14:01, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

@MarMi wiki: You raise an interesting point about being logged in or not. Do you mean that the autosave feature should only be available when logged in? I've been looking into the possibility of client-side storage (with indexedDB), and that would mean that the data would actually be available to anyone with access to the device. It would make sense to clear it when the user logs out, but if the feature is available when not logged in then maybe we'd want a way for the user to clear it (although, it's the same situation with cookies and localStorage, which I guess we assume people deal with that by using private browsing windows where necessary). A shared device is already pretty hard to make secure between the multiple people using it, and I does seem like responsibility for that lies with the browser and operating system, not individual websites. Sam Wilson 03:12, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

@Samwilson:
Logged in: I said that because I edit when logged in (at least doing the longer edits, when the auto-save would be the most useful). Also, after browser crash, when you restart browser, you could be logged out from Wikipedia (I guess browser in some cases can lose/corrupt/erase cookies), so the auto-save recovery process would probably trigger after logging in again anyway.
It may be easier (or not) to implement auto-save for users with account than for those without it (shared/dynamic IPs). MarMi wiki (talk) 10:14, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

@MarMi wiki: That makes sense. It sounds like it's best if we store the recovery data per-user, and that way logged-out vs logged-in (including multiple users on the same device) get their own saved data and can't accidentally clobber each others. It won't mean the data is actually private though (i.e. anyone can just open the dev tools in the browser to look at it), so we'll have to be careful about how to let people know that just because they have to log back in to recover it doesn't mean that the data is hidden. Sam Wilson 08:43, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I never needed an auto-save feature, but it would be a nice way to calm my mind during edits which turn out to be longer (at the moment I simply copy the text into a text editor, when it gets larger)

• Duration: I guess as long as it takes to restart a browser/PC (+a bit of buffer) should be fine in most cases
• Content: For my personally a copy of the page I was editing would be enough (no need for any convenience features)

Nuretok (talk) 16:26, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

A user loses their connection for whatever reason. Others posted above suggesting until the user can restart their browser or system. I think these days the failure is more likely to be in the connection than it is in their local system. It's possible the browser locks up, but it seems more likely that they lose their IP address, change cell towers, experience some denial-of-service of their Internet connection, etc. This past week I was traveling and only had a good connection if I held my phone up above my head. Resting the phone anywhere would drop to one bar and lose data service.

The cause of the problem influences the solution. I think saving locally is more likely to address common issues. 5 MB is a lot of text, and the user can be warned if they approach or exceed the 5 MB limit so they know their changes aren't being auto-saved. If this also solves legal issues, it seems like a better solution.

If storing on the server, you are assuming a good connection. I think you can only store on the server if you also store locally. That way, you cover either a local system failure or a network/connection failure. If saving on the server only, you need to notify users when the connection isn't saving. Google does this on some (maybe all?) of their autosave applications.

How long? My initial thought was 24 hours. Seven days or ten days would also work. 10 minutes assumes they can restore their connection quickly. I'm not sure that's a valid assumption. Certainly there are Internet outages for even well-connected users that last for several hours. I've often been driving (technically riding, someone else was driving) and lose my Internet connection for a couple of hours out in the "boonies" somewhere. The data would only need to be retained until the user's next connection and a response to whether they want to resume the saved edit or discard it (unless legal needs to retain it longer for whatever reason).

I don't see this as being in the scope of an offline editing tool. Saving the current edit text is as far as I would want to go with it. Beyond that, I think you add a lot of implementation complexity without adding immediate value. Once I know I don't have a good connection, I can either stop editing or use some other tool to save my work.

Dave Braunschweig (talk) 21:46, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

This is largely what I had expected too. The situations where I would want it are where the Internet has gone down or my browser has crashed, but I had been typing a bunch of content without copy/pasting into a local file. So for my use cases, at least, storing the plain wikitext that’s currently in my edit window would suffice (and probably zips to smaller than saving a richtext HTML blob from VE, though I’m both guessing and solutionising here, sorry!) My other use-case, incidentally is that Wikidata’s UI doesn’t seem to mark forms as dirty, so my tab-suspender extension blanks out my work. But that’s definitely stretching scope 😛)

I had largely anticipated localStorage would be the easiest solution but I had completely overlooked the size limit. Given it’s 5 MiB for all of localStorage, might a simpler MVP be to use localStorage and alert users if they are nearing or exceeding that threshold? I would certainly favour something like “here is a first attempt, let’s iterate on that, possibly next year” over “this has been on the wishlist for years, so we need to get it ‘right’ before rolling anything out” — OwenBlacker (Talk; he/him) 17:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@OwenBlacker: Thanks for pointing out the Wikidata issue. I've been testing local-saving with multiple content types (e.g. CSS, and ProofreadPage's headers/footers) but hadn't thought about the more complicated forms. I think it'd be good to explicitly exclude Wikidata, as it's not like there's normally very much data there to recover anyway, and the time spent editing before saving is usually pretty small compared to long-form wikitext pages. Sam Wilson 08:49, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

@Dave Braunschweig: The 5MB limit is avoided if we use indexedDB. That means we can store as much as we want really, although I think it should purge old recovery data after e.g. 90 days (with or without a message to the user, I'm not really sure). It means it can also give users an overview of what data is stored, as in a list of all pages with any data (if we want to do that). Sam Wilson 08:57, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

@Samwilson: Avoiding the limit is fine. But consider the many devices this might occur on. Using 10s or 100s of MB of computer storage shouldn't be an issue. Using that much storage on my mobile devices could be a problem. I don't see a need to save anything locally once it is saved remotely. And I don't see a need to save recovery data once the user reconnects. "Hey, you have unsaved changes. Do you want to save them now or delete them?" Done. Only retain what you need, and only for the lifetime necessary to meet the need, unless legal is indicating otherwise. At least that's my perspective. -- Dave Braunschweig (talk) 01:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@Dave Braunschweig: Yeah, we need to make sure it's only storing what's required. Certainly, the local data can be deleted after the user has clicked publish (or rather, after the page has loaded so we know it was successful), and if they click cancel. I think there might still be quite a few ways in which they could end up with data saved that isn't really useful to them, so I wonder if it'd be good to have a way of showing what is stored. The proof of concept that I'm working on at the moment has a button that says "Last recovery point 12:34PM" and opens a popup that shows all pages that have any recovery data saved, along with a means of deleting each. Sam Wilson 03:55, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@icodemasterkevdav how do I recover lost data? Icodemasterkevdav (talk) 11:54, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

@Icodemasterkevdavis this used for iOS? Icodemasterkevdav (talk) 11:54, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

@Icodemasterkevdav: I don't think it works for the iOS app. The Edit recovery feature, if switched on, is for browsers. mw:Manual:Edit Recovery says it uses the IndexedDB, which is a browser feature. You could edit using a browser instead of the app like Safari, Chrome or Firefox and Edit recovery should work. You could request a recovery feature for iOS at Community Wishlist. Commander Keane (talk) 22:11, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Restoring on different devices

I'd love to know what people think about whether it should be possible to restore a lost edit on a different device. It's a bit of a fundamental aspect to the feature, because if we do want to restore elsewhere then we need to be storing the data on the server. It also means that if the network connection is lost then the recovery data can't be stored. Sam Wilson 03:59, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

We're settling on the MVP being to only be able to restore on the same device. This doesn't necessarily exclude further work in the future to make cross-device restoration possible, but for now it seems like it's the most important. Sam Wilson 08:23, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Honestly i wouldn't expect my lost edits to be saved across devices. Jorm (talk) 00:07, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Restoring separate sections

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T344410

Does anyone have an opinion on how it should handle section editing? At the moment it stores recovery data for each section separately, which means any section can be recovered independently (as well as whole-page editing). This works well, I think, except for when a page is edited by someone else before you recover, and they add or remove a section (that stuffs up the section numbering). It seems like it might make sense to throw away all recovery data for a page and all its sections whenever any section or the whole page is saved (or editing cancelled). Does that sound correct? The idea being that if somone's saving a page or part thereof they're saying that they're done with editing. Sam Wilson 05:11, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

There is more discussion about this topic in phab:T344410. Sam Wilson 04:14, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Why not use LocalStorage?

(Comment moved here from project page.)

Thanks. As web developer I do not understand the anti-localStorage concerns. It seems that for all solutions we indeed need to handle collisions in case of multiple tabs, and also for all solutions we indeed should auto-clean stuff after some time. A web page content is just some Kilobytes and the localStorage allows megabytes. We are not supposed to save every "stub" but just the most recent ones. So, I would be inclined to re-consider the localStorage, or share more concerns. --ValerioBozz (talk) 09:40, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

@Valerio Bozzolan: (I've moved your comment here from the project page; hope that's okay.) The main reason to avoid localStorage is that it's limited to 5 MB, and has to be shared between all usages on a site. You're right that each page isn't that large, but some can be half a megabyte or more, and so it's safer to not use up that quota. There's no limit to the number of pages that might be stored by Edit Recovery. As for collisions between restoring in different tabs: I'm not sure I understand the concern. Do you mean that someone might be editing the same page in two different places in two tabs, and then close both, and then expect to be able to recover each separately? The way that'd work now is that the most recently-edited one would win out. Sam Wilson 04:13, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Sam. Now I understand the use-case for having more than 1 page to be recovered. I'm not used to write more than one "big" edit in more than one page at the same time but indeed it's something that could be proactively supported. Premising that this seems over-kill to me, but - if I understand correctly - this may become a super-loved killer feature for offline contributors. ValerioBozz (talk) 08:34, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

@Valerio Bozzolan: Actually, I'm not sure we really evaluated the idea of only being able to restore a single page; that certainly would've reduced the storage requirements. However, I think the multiple-page approach is good, and we've done a fair bit of it now so I think it's best to carry on. I'll be interested to see how loved this becomes! I sort of feel like it's something that'll disappear into the background and not really be noticed. :) Sam Wilson 09:19, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

How did testing Edit-Recovery on beta go?

I tried it without logging in on a heavily-modded-out version of Firefox and it worked just like it's supposed to. Same with a stock install of Brave. Neat! Did not seem to work with a pretty stock install of Safari (using the visual editor) when I was logged out, but worked fine when I was logged in. Also worked fine when I was logged OUT but using the source editor. I tend to mainly use the Source editor so it's possible I'm doing something weird with the visual editor. Jessamyn (talk) 01:16, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@Jessamyn: Thanks for testing it. You're not doing anything weird — this feature is currently only for the wikitext editor! Visual Editor does have its own recovery system but that only currently works when you stay within the same tab (e.g. navigating away and back again, whereas we want Edit Recovery to be more robust than that, and work if you quit the browser etc.). Sam Wilson 05:35, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Speaking of VisualEditor’s recovery system, that displays a notification when restoring. I’d find it useful in the wikitext version as well, first to reassure the user that the edit has been recovered, and second to make them aware that the edit window already contains changes compared to the published version, which they may want to undo before they start editing and it’ll get much more difficult to tell new changes and restored changes apart. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: The notification feature is very nearly done! It's in code review at the moment. It'll look something like the screenshots here: phab:T342721#9260675. It's got buttons for showing the diff, and discarding the recovered data. Sam Wilson 00:33, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

The notification is now done and can be tested on Beta. See what you think. Sam Wilson 06:07, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

How do I apply to make custom changes 105.245.56.237 10:18, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

@Samwilson are there any plans to add full edit recovery to the visual editor? I didn't realize until just now that this was the case. It's bitten me in the butt a few times. Given everything in the editor has to be converted into WikiText either way, I'm not sure why the two couldn't be stored together. Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 18:27, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Opt-out

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T350653

While I find this project generally quite useful, I personally more often abandon edits intentionally by closing the browser tab than unintentionally (unintentional abandonment includes accidentally pressing Ctrl+W, power outage, browser freeze etc.), so I don’t want to waste my disk space and be annoyed by auto-restored edits that are old and no longer relevant. Could there be a per-user opt-out? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:38, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: That sounds interesting. Would you want to be able to turn it on and off per-page or per-session, or is it more that you'd just never want it on? Would a checkbox in Preferences be okay? One idea we've got in the works at the moment is to add a Special page to list all stored data (on all pages), and maybe on that page we could have a on/off toggle for the feature. Sam Wilson 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

@Samwilson: I think a checkbox in preferences would be the most useful. I can’t imagine never wanting to have edit recovery on a given page, but wanting to have it on other pages, so per-page doesn’t really make sense. If I want to not have edit recovery for a given session, I can just press the Cancel link afterwards to cancel the recovery for that time (although I’m not sure how intuitive it is; it’s probably worth being mentioned in the general information section you envision on Special:EditRecovery), or use Special:EditRecovery or the notification popup to discard afterwards. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 13:39, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: Yeah all good points. I think the special page will be able to contain lots of this info. I've created task T350653 to track the addition of the preference. Sam Wilson 06:05, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Or should we have a back + forward button like in Microsoft Word, Excel or code editors? JrandWP (talk) 00:40, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

@JrandWP: That sounds interesting, but I'm not quite sure of what you mean. What would backwards and forwards do in the context of enabling/disabling Edit Recovery? Where would the buttons go? Sam Wilson 01:39, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Like having a back + forward button to rollback changes that you are making... JrandWP (talk) 03:01, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

@JrandWP: The current way of rolling back changes is via a notification (see example at right) that is shown when the edit form is opened. Does this match your idea? There's only a single edit saved for recovery at any point, so there's no way or need to navigate between different versions of unsaved data. Sam Wilson 02:16, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

So you can discard your changes and this is a good thing. JrandWP (talk) 03:11, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

autoBackup@PerfektesChaos

Just for the record: en:User:PerfektesChaos/js/autoBackup is doing the same task since 2012 by localStorage.

• indexed DB was not present in 2012. Availability / disabled for privacy reasons (avoid tracking) needs to be checked.
• You may find some ideas in Customization section.
• It does not only recover from browser crash, but also when deleting large part of text by accident, e.g. blanking the textarea field, then pressing [preview]. Simple recovery would provide an empty space.
• Opening the same page in another page will show the recovery menu, even more if a second edit thread is started.

PerfektesChaos (talk) 22:38, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

@PerfektesChaos: Thanks for the link to autoBackup, it looks very interesting! To your points… IndexedDB is now supported by all browsers that we target. Even almost all Grade C browsers have full support, with only IE 11 having some issues (which I don't think come into play with how we're using, but I must admit I've not tested with IE). Your approach of storing multiple versions seems really interesting, and does as you say give greater protection against accidental changes. We might at some point want to do something similar, but for now we're just trying to get a simple version working and to iron out all the issues with that. Sam Wilson 01:15, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Preference required, resource consumption

A user preference should be defined, best opt-in, at least opt-out.

• On slow machines a check and storage of many kilobytes every few seconds may slow down input.
• It can be noticed by users since typing becomes a kind of weak, the typed letter does not appear immediately.
• In earlier times this effect was rather common. Currently I would not expect that on new devices, but many users around the globe would experience that.

IF I am working with a stable system I do not need such helper.

• If my browser is restoring form fields even after crash for all websites I do not need nor want double work.
• If a helped myself by autoBackup@PerfektesChaos I do not want resource consumption by a second and third approach.

PerfektesChaos (talk) 19:46, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

@PerfektesChaos: These are good points, thanks! We now have a preference in place for this feature (you can see it on testwiki), so hopefully that will be sufficient to avoid problems with it interfering with your own script. As for the speed of typing: Edit Recovery works by only saving once the user has stopped typing for five seconds or navigates away from the edit form. Saving to the database is also asynchronous and so shouldn't interfere with anything else. Sam Wilson 01:07, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Production documentation

Hi @STei (WMF): it appears the default production documentation for this at mw:Help:Edit Recovery may need some completing as this is being launched in to production. Is someone from the team available to do that? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Xaosflux thank you for mentioning this, yes we're on it. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Special page persistence

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T353996

Hi. It's very hard to get rid of the Special:EditRecovery items. Sometimes impossible. Can you do something, please? Maybe improve the algorithm. Or maybe add a button on each line "forget this item". Please! IKhitron (talk) 16:50, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I like the idea of “forget this item” links. Even if the algorithm is improved, it would allow getting rid of items in edge cases like

• Edit Recovery was turned off in the meantime (no need to turn it back on just to get rid of the already-saved edits);
• the saved section ceased to exist in the meantime (e.g. some topics were archived);
• the page was protected in the meantime;
• the title was made illegal in the meantime, making it impossible to even navigate to the page.

—Tacsipacsi (talk) 23:14, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, and there are more. For example,

• There are two items for the same page in the list, so one of them stays forever;
• The diff in the memory is empty;
• A case when behaviors of page editing and section editing clush with each other.

IKhitron (talk) 23:25, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi @IKhitron thanks for this feedback. @Nardog wrote a ticket delete directly from the special page. Is this the same thing?

Is it possible, if you could share what you meant by "forget" an item in the Special:EditRecovery page and, if it's possible, to capture a screengrab of the items you'd like to forget. This would help us better understand what your goals are. jack (talk) 03:20, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Absolutely, thank you for the link. IKhitron (talk) 09:13, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Scheduled obsolescence

• After some three or seven days the page name should be forgotten.
• It is common practice to open a page, taking a look into source code. Wikitext might have been modified, by experimental syntax change, or automatically by running a script on edit start.
• This would collect thousands of entries over decades.
  • That does flood the special page.
  • It will break browser quota by 100 kB blobs over years.
  • Moved pages will reside forever.
• Alternatively the number of page entries may be limited to 10 or 20 or whatever.
  • Counting number of entries is easier to check, and deleting the oldest ones. Requires sequential order in object, which is basically random.
  • Memorizing the Unix timestamp and add multiple 86400 for expiry time is not a big deal either.

The previous section on manual forgetting is targetting a similar goal, but requires manual action.

• If you cannot fix your device within one week, or re-establish the internet connection, it cannot be expected that you can just proceed. Furthermore you may run into edit conflicts now.

PerfektesChaos (talk) 14:58, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

There is a feature keep-me-permanently-logged-in, which keeps a session open for at least one year or in eternity?

I am permanently logged in for several years now. At least, I feel never a need to log out myself. No idea how this is tracked at login facility and this tool.

--PerfektesChaos (talk) 15:59, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

"It will break browser quota by 100 kB blobs over years" - Note IndexedDB can store dozens of GBs of data. GZWDer (talk) 12:01, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

@PerfektesChaos: Currently the expiry time for stored edits is set at 30 days. If this proves to be too much, we can easily change it. However, as @GZWDer mentions, the storage API is fairly generous in its capabilities. Regarding edit conflicts, you're right in that the longer the time between the original edit and the recovery the higher the chances are that someone else has edited in the meantime — currently, we check for subsequent changes and add a notice to the recovery popup that says Note that the page may have changed since you started editing. Please review your changes before publishing. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 06:34, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

The documentation does not mention any time limit yet.

It is no big deal, whether 30, 7, 14, 10 days.

The scenario is that my device or network connection or browser session crashed. I might need some time to get the same browser running and connect to the web, but after weeks I will have other business than to continue old wiki sessions, and I forgot the issues.

About quota: The total size of all kinds of web storage for all domains or per domain may be limited, e.g. if I use a device with limited harddisk capacity.

--PerfektesChaos (talk) 17:17, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

I noticed that clearing my browser cache also clears my edit recovery list. —Bruce1ee^talk 10:18, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Privacy block

The feature is technically available in all common browsers.

• However, for privacy reasons this may be disabled for this user.
  • Both WebStorage and indexed DB permit websites to memorize page access with different user accounts.
  • That permits personal merging even when disguised.
• Therefore, the JS should detect unavailable API.
  • This should be indicated by message box if the account requested edit recovery but current device is refusing storage.
    • May be quota exceeded or intentionally prohibited.
    • Now user must not rely on recovery.
  • It should be mentioned in tool documentation.

PerfektesChaos (talk) 15:01, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Edit check loads on preview.

This is quite annoying because it blocks some of the edit window and defocuses the cursor. It would be great if you could fix that. NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 10:49, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

@NightWolf1223: Are you referring to the Edit Recovery notification? It can be dismissed by clicking anywhere within it. (But note also that Edit check is a separate project to Edit Recovery.) With the Edit Recovery notification, the cursor should still be focused within the main textarea; are you not seeing that work correctly? What element is being given the focus instead? SWilson (WMF) (talk) 06:14, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Serious concerns about usability

I activated edit recovery about a week ago to see whether I liked it. I do in principle, especially for my sandbox but want to mention a major issue with it when used for mainspace. I use MS Edge on a standard PC running Windows 11 and the WP source editor.

I tend to keep multiple windows or tabs open, including my sandbox for developing text + citations (which I never save, only preview). In other tabs I usually have the article I'm working on and/or its Talk Page. After a save/publish of an edit to some section of an article I often return later to make further edits to the same section. However, in the meantime someone else may have added content: even reverted my earlier edit. Now the edit-recovery feature is a downside: if I don't notice it has recovered the now out-of-date section and cancel it, I may inadvertently end up removing the other editor's contribution or re-introduce my own now-reverted contribution. Is this something others have noticed and is there a work-around? Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 15:57, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Hey @Michael D. Turnbull could you possibly share a video of this experience? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 18:57, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm pretty tech-savvy but I think that's beyond my capabilities! I posted this comment on noticing a now out-of-date section where another editor had made a change after mine and the software had "recovered" my version, ignoring theirs. To reproduce the issue, you would probably need two editors working alongside each other from different accounts and co-ordinating their edits to deliberately try to create this clash. Sorry I can't help further. Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 19:16, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

... I've just read some of the threads just below on this TalkPage and I think that they are expressing different facets of the same problem. Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 19:19, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

About the content of Special EditRecovery

Reading the source code, it displays the list of unrecovered changes with the wikitext editor. Is it possible to display the saved unrecovered changes of the VisualEditor in the future too? As it stands, the special page may be confusing. Otherwise, thanks for the feature! Lofhi (talk) 08:45, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Should ask whether to recover and not whether to discard

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T364664

More often then not, this feature "recovers" an old edit when that edit had been abandoned and some other edit saved. Edit-recovery feature should ask whether an edit should be recovered (like most modern word processors do), and not whether it should be discarded. It's a useful feature, but has caused me some trouble while editing articles, as well as modules and templates (ouch!). pon_or (talk) 12:32, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

I just disabled this feature for this reason; I left a page with an open edit box in order to reset my changes back to the current version and try again, and they got auto-recovered. Perhaps if there were a button to undo all changes, or discard instead of preview, that would help. -- Beland (talk) 01:46, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @Ponor @Beland - we've been gathering information about Edit Recovery and I'd love to learn more about your experiences? Would you be open to chatting 1:1 so I can better understand the pain points you've encountered? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 18:55, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Sure! -- Beland (talk) 20:10, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Sure II. pon_or (talk) 20:42, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

@Beland @Ponor feel free to book a meeting here! https://calendar.app.google/7jzigkizEHAK68vGA JWheeler-WMF (talk) 01:56, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Ponor, be glad that this feature asks about rejecting recovery. On Chromium it doesn't ask for anything. I have to disable this feature if I want to continue a discussion with another user. Sławek Borewicz (talk) 05:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Discard on submit

Sometimes, I start editing the article in one tab, later rediscover the edit through another tab editing the same page, and I submit the edit. This still results in EditRecovery attempting to recover the edit. Could drafts be discarded on submit? Aaron Liu (talk) 15:42, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

I have experienced the same problem. Sometimes, submitting, or also intentionally closing a tab during an edit, opening another one or similar actions cause unasked-for surprise recoveries that end up in newer edits to the same page. For the actual purpose of recovering from a crash or accidental actions, it would be completely sufficient to be informed about the existence of a backup copy, and to be asked if that should be used. Automatic unrequested recovery is rather harmful than helpful. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 01:22, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I agree, maybe the behavior should be to ask to recover instead of asking to discard. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:39, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Asked the same question ~3 inches above. Report on Phabricator as a bug? pon_or (talk) 01:15, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

It's not the same question, but TBF brought yours up again.

If reporting to Phabricator, search for duplicates and file a feature request. Good luck! Aaron Liu (talk) 12:45, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Note by a guinea pig

I worked several hours on de:Veit Stoß, during that time two other users made small routine edits. I was told by a header to activate the Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface, which I did, the preview then showed my edits again. But it did not update the edited page, my edit was gone and didn't show up in the edit history. I immediately went back to editing mode (because I had a feeling...), but I saw no way to recover it. I asked the two editors about it, if they knew a way... Several hours later I was willing to try to reconstruct my lost edits, and, suddenly, there is this small pop-up 8-]

So, thank you very much, it worked for me. But now I just wonder, why the time delay, why I didn't see it immediately, when I 'went in' again (with the feeling..., because I was here on the discussion page before)? Maybe it is new to you or you know why. MenkinAlRire (talk) 23:20, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

My feedback

I have been using this for a couple weeks and I'm disabling it now. I think this is pretty good for an experimental feature, and I am very glad it was developed, although I do have to echo the concerns raised by some of the above posters. There are a couple issues that make this basically unusable for me. In general, most of them stem from the fact that it automatically the contents of the edit box on page load without my input. Oftentimes, I open a page to edit it, and then close the tab; even if I haven't made any modifications to the text, this causes the feature to save the contents of the edit box. Later (and after subsequent edits by other users), if I edit that page, it will overwrite the edit box with the saved content from my previous editing sesh -- in effect, reverting every change made on the page since I last opened the edit window. The only indication it gives me is a little popup that disappears very quickly, meaning that if I have an edit window open, I don't have any way of telling what is in the edit box.

I think this UX issue could be improved by, instead of a popup that went away and left no trace once dismissed, there was some indication in the window that you were viewing a saved draft -- and the timestamp that this draft was being restored from. I think it could be vastly improved by, rather than pre-emptively overwriting the contents of the edit box with the saved draft, instead giving you a little button you could press to restore it (perhaps next to said timestamp indicator). Anyway, this is just a thought. Thanks for your work! JPxG (talk) 02:28, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Note that the preferences menu specifically told me to come here to give feedback, so if there's somewhere else I'm supposed to go, please change the link in the menu. JPxG (talk) 02:29, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @JPxG - this aligns with some of the feedback above, which suggests that a "restore" edits feature would be more useful. We're continuing to evaluate usage and feedback to see if additional changes to Edit Recovery are necessary. JWheeler-WMF (talk) 13:44, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

The tool should ask before restoring edits

I've just disabled this feature as it's quite annoying to have the page content automatically get overwritten. The feature also takes several seconds to load, so I often forget that I have a previously-discarded edit, start typing, and suddenly have all of my changes replaced. If I'm missing some kind of switch please let me know. Ioaxxere (talk) 22:13, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Feedback requested

Hi folks - we would like to know if Edit-Recovery is working as expected, or if users would prefer, as some have mentioned in the talk page above, for Edit-Recovery to prompt users to "restore" edits instead.

We hope to make a decision by 26 September, 2024. JWheeler-WMF (talk) 01:59, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

If this talk page and phab:T364664 are anything to go by, I think it's pretty obvious we want it to recover on demand, not on page load. I've disabled it because I can't make it work with my scripts (T353998). And I'm surprised T354186 is still open, seems like a no-brainer. Nardog (talk) 01:11, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Update on how edits are restored

Hello everyone, we have implemented the feedback on recovering edits on demand. Please read more. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Link to feature Help page from User Preferences

This feature is opt-in, so anybody discovering it by seeing the option under their Preferences doesn't know what it is. However, the Preferences page currently links to the [this talk page], which is non-informative, and the Special:EditRecovery page, which is even more non-informative as it is only meant to be used after the feature has been enabled.

The only way for a new user to get information about this feature is to find the [? Help] button in the top right corner of the nearly-empty Special page, which may not be intuitive on wide screen devices.

I believe that the Preferences page should link to mediawikiwiki:Help:Edit_Recovery; either instead of the Special page or in addition to it. The Help page has an explanation of and a link to the Special page, so I believe replacing it on the Preferences page is ideal.

Linking to the Help page also conforms with the links for almost all other unique features in User Preferences, which nearly all link directly to a guide regarding those features.

Varixai (talk) 20:51, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Seconded; I came here for exactly that reason. I consider myself an advanced user, and even I was perplexed. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 14:39, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Bug report for mobile

I am having inconsistent edit recovery experiences on mobile. I have not tested desktop or Wikipedia articles, just discussion pages. I will use Wikimedia Commons as an example (I have edit recovery enabled there). I use the regular wikitext editor, not VisualEditor.

Scenario 1 - edit recovery fails

• I visit c:COM:HD, pick a random topic, hit the three dots, press edit and input "Test edit blah" at the bottom of the edit box.
• I close the tab (Chrome Mobile / Android 13)
• Immediately visiting c:Special:EditRecovery shows no entries (I know looking here isn't a necessary step, I just was looking for bugs)
• When visiting c:COM:HD in a fresh tab the edit is not recovered, I waited 20 seconds and nothing happened.

Scenario 2 - special page is incorrect

• I visit c:COM:HD, pick a random topic, hit "Reply" and input "Test edit blah".
• I close the tab (Chrome Mobile / Android 13)
• Immediately visiting c:Special:EditRecovery shows no entries (I know looking here isn't a necessary step, I just was looking for bugs)
• When visiting c:COM:HD in a fresh tab the edit is recovered and my reply "Test edit blah" is there (it takes a few seconds to load on mobile, that is fine)

On mobile, Scenario 1 is a big problem as Chrome reloads tabs at-will when you look away from them (permalink to Reference desk question I had). I didn't see manually editing a talk page section listed as a limitation in the docs, if someone could confirm my bug and submit a Phabricator bug report (or link me to an existing bug report) that would be great. Commander Keane (talk) 02:34, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I just edited my above comment as I was linking to the meta Special page rather than the commons one. I retested and the stated bug persists. Ironically when I retested I changed tabs and lost this comment as Edit recovery failed. Second time lucky I guess. Also I looked in phab and didn't find a relevant bug. I am not switching between VE and wikitext mode. I can share my full editing preferences if it helps (but I need to save this now before looking at another tab, as I am editing a comment and not replying).--Commander Keane (talk) 04:20, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

The second scenario is mw:Extension:DiscussionTools, which uses a different edit recovery mechanism (maybe it shares recovery with VisualEditor, even if you use the source mode? I’m not sure, but I’m 100% sure that it’s different—and older—than the recovery discussed here), so it makes sense that it doesn’t show up on Special:EditRecovery. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 23:35, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Okay I wasn't aware of different recovery mechanisms. So really the problem is that I am not using DiscussionTools (which works) when editing a talk page manually. EditRecovery does seem to work for me on Commons now, but the 5 seconds quoted in the docs could be suspect. mw:Help:DiscussionTools doesn't seem to mention a recovery method. I may investigate later. Commander Keane (talk) 01:38, 17 March 2025 (UTC)