Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Auto-save feature/Proposal/ru

• Problem:

When making larger edits, and in particular writing new articles, there is a possibility of data loss (possibly a few hours worth) due to:

• • a power outage,
  • a browser crash,
  • a network outage (if one chooses to preview their changes while network is temporarily offline),
  • accidental browser closure.

It is a fairly standard feature in modern software to auto-save user edits to guard against such incidents. Auto-saving is ubiquitous in cloud-based software, where it has the added (or perhaps main) benefit of allowing the user not to think about saving their work/to carry on working on the same document in multiple sittings/across multiple devices. (This would arguably be desirable to have on Wiki in its own right.) "Offline" software also often has an auto-save feature, though generally for crash recovery only (e.g. LibreOffice).

The code editor does not currently provide any kind of auto-save functionality, while the Visual Editor appears to have some sort of auto-save implemented, or so I gather based on phab:T57370 (I do not normally use Visual Editor, so cannot tell whether it is indeed present; if it is, then it appears to be both undocumented and hidden, with no indication in the UI that anything is being saved - so almost as good as if it wasn't there at all).

Some workarounds that users, especially those who have experienced data loss in the past, are likely to employ include:

• periodically copying their work from the Wiki editor to an external program (e.g. Notepad) and saving it locally;
• writing whole articles in an external program and only copying them into a Wiki editor once ready;
• writing their article in their sandbox and saving regularly.

Each of these is inconvenient/time-consuming/decreases productivity.

• Proposed solution:

A reliable auto-save functionality which regularly saves user edits in the background, which works both in the code editor and the Visual Editor, which allows these edits to be restored in the 4 cases listed above.

Desirable:

• An indicator in the UI of the editor which tells the user if or when the page they are editing was last saved - to reassure them that auto-save is indeed present and functioning, and thus they do not need to resort to any of the workarounds mentioned above.
• Saving these edits online (to Wiki servers), so as to allow the user to carry on working on one page in multiple sittings/across multiple devices. (Just to clarify: until published by the user, these edits should remain private and not visible to anyone else than the user in question).

• Who would benefit:

All editors, but in particular:

• those who write larger articles, and two groups which, I believe, Wikimedia is particularly keen to recruit/retain:
  • new editors, who are likely to be particularly discouraged if their hard work is lost,
  • editors in countries, where power outages/"load shedding" occur frequently, which are disproportionally likely to be in the Global South (such as India or South Africa, if media reports are to be believed).

• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Delta 51 (talk) 22:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)