Drafts extension enabled on Test Wikipedia

So sometimes you’re editing away on a totally awesome page on Wikipedia…

When suddenly disaster strikes! You close your window by mistake, or the browser crashes, or a save failed and you can’t quite get back to where you were. All your work is lost. :(

Well, fear no more! With the Drafts extension in place, your work is saved in the background every 2 minutes, or every time you preview or hit the save draft button:

When you return to your article after your catastrophic event and click “edit” again, you’ll be presented with  a list of your saved draft(s):

Pick it out of the list, and you’re back in business!

When you successfully save, the draft is discarded. (You can explicitly discard one if you don’t want it… they’ll be automatically thrown away after 30 days.) You can also pull up a list of all your saved drafts at Special:Drafts, in case you forgot where your page was.

After some more testing on test.wikipedia.org and maybe a little tweaking, we’ll start rolling things out to the main sites…

The Drafts extension is one of the first bits of work our staff developer Trevor Parscal did for us, but testing it got pushed back in all the crazy recent times with fundraisers and holidays and everybody starting new projects. :) We’re now starting to get back down to regular business, and lots of nice new things are going to be popping up!

Updated 2009-01-18: Fixed typo mentioned in comment. :)