1

i was making a wikihow that could actually help people’s lives in the future, but right when i went to a site i was using as a reference, my work was gone. why?

2

To be sure I’m clear on what you’re saying - are you saying you switched tabs (leaving the edit window open) and lost your work, or that you exited the page and lost your work? Because if you leave the page, that’s normal behavior (though you might be able to find a draft of your work at Special:Drafts ). If you’re just changing tabs and leaving your edit window open, that’s not normal behavior - what browser are you using and on what device?

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3

i opened a new tab. i use google chrome on an ipad air 2.

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I see - did the tab you were writing in refresh itself, by any chance? And have you checked your drafts to see if anything saved?

If you’re worried about this happening in the future, you also can either write {{inuse}} at the start of your article and then publish it and continue to work on it, or work on it offsite like through Google Docs or Word so you don’t lose anything.:slight_smile:

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I had the same thing happen using Chrome on a Win10 PC. I had to completely rewrite what I’d done the first time. There was no saved copy of my version 1.

BTW, I should say, now I save frequently, at least after editing a section.

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@CageyCat @Julia2002 Question for both of you - were you starting an article via Advanced Editor, or through the Article Creator? I think by default it’s set to Advanced Editor these days, but I know Article Creator is old and kind of buggy, and it doesn’t hook into the draft system.

And CC, to be clear on the circumstances for you - there was no refreshing or other potential loss of data transmission (e.g. computer going into sleep mode) involved?

I’m on Chrome on a Mac and haven’t had this happen to me, so I’m trying to figure out what the commonality is here. The only way I personally have lost data is from the page itself refreshing, or from the computer going to sleep or losing internet connection.

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No. I already went over the details with Jayne in another thread. Mine was through the editor. It was just maddening / disappointing to do a major rewrite, only to have it disappear. But after a couple-few weeks, I bit my mad-emotion and rewrote it – again. It was about R.N. documentation. Like I said, I learned to “save as I go”, not “just save once” after I rewrote an entire article. Losing work is NO fun. It wasn’t saved and the database was like “you never edited it”. Grrrr. I hope it never happens to me again. If I didn’t know the topic very well, I woulda walked away from the loss.

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That’s odd. The draft system isn’t all that reliable, to be fair, but article content shouldn’t be getting eaten while the tabs are still open. Going to ping @JayneG so that she sees this after the weekend.

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@Julia2002 Alex has given you some good advice here. In general, you don’t want to leave the page you’re on when creating an article if you’re on a device that may reload the tab when you go back to it, like iPads often do. I definitely second creating the article in a separate document, and pasting it in. In the meantime, I’d also suggest you check your drafts - fingers crossed!

We have also had some issues with a different error, which I believe is what CageyCat experienced where it’s seemingly a timeout error. Reuben has looked into this in depth and it seems to be connected to resetting of the memcache, and isn’t something we can entirely prevent. However, we did update the error message that goes with it to help those who experience that issue and they should still have access to their content.