What can I do to prevent write-write conflicts on a wiki-style website?

Question

On a wiki-style website, what can I do to prevent or mitigate write-write conflicts while still allowing the site to run quickly and keeping the site easy to use?

The pr

Answer 1

At my office, we have a policy that all data tables contain 4 fields:

• CreatedBy
• CreatedDate
• LastUpdateBy
• LastUpdateDate

That way there is a nice audit trail on who has done what to the records, at least most recently.

But most importantly, it becomes easy enough to compare the LastUpdateDate of the current or edited record on the screen (requires you to store it on the page, in a cookie, whatever, with the value in the database. If the values don't match, you can decide what to do from there.