How does a wiki handle multiple simultaneous edits?

Question

This has always lingered in the back of my mind, so I figure I might as well go ahead and ask.

How does a wiki handle multiple edits on the same content?

Here\'s

Answer 1

It depends on the flavor of wiki. There are many dozens or hundreds of wiki clones. Typically the second user will get a "this page has been edited by another user" error message, and then they must go reload the page and redo their edits.

A wiki certainly could merge the two edits together the same way a version control system like Subversion does. If you're familiar with the UNIX patch command, it would involve diffing user 2's edit and generating a patch which is then applied. The patch may or may not succeed; in your example there'd be a merge conflict, and so it'd be back to the old "this page has been edited by another user, you lose" error message.