Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-25046910-20160521014944/@comment-856287-20160522014829

I frequently have pages in edit mode in a tab for hours at a time, even though I'm not actually editing them (or I have no intention of ever publishing my edits)... Just viewing the source for whatever reason, or experimenting and looking at the preview rendering. Often, the tab stays open while I work on something else. If you were notified of this and didn't edit the page because I had it in edit mode, that would be bad. If it was locked, as Lil' Miss Rarity suggested, I'd end up locking people out for hours for no reason. xD

I have seen Template:Inuse, though I'm not sure how useful that is in a day-to-day workflow when you're not doing some major overhaul/omnibus edit. Also, it doesn't prevent edit conflicts, especially if you don't happen to notice it before you start making changes :P

Usually it's pretty easy to resolve edit conflicts anyway. Check the history to see what they changed and copy it into your edit, or copy the part(s) you edited into the more recently published version. I've personally never seen a page where I and another user edited the same thing with completely different results that could not be reconciled.

...it might be kind of neat to have collaborative edit mode as in apps like SubEthaEdit, where more than one person is changing the same page at the same time, and your edits show up live as you type for everyone working on it... but then again maybe not xD