Last modified: 2011-06-07 01:57:49 UTC
The Upload Wizard disables the browsers "Back" button effectively. That makes it impossible to correct typing mishaps on earlier pages, and it makes it impossible to recover from errors such as broken uploads or the pretty common "publish" step never ending without complete loss of all informations ever typed. This behavior should be corrected by saving each and everything in a buffer that can be recovered by the user. See Extension:Draft for a possible way to do that. Maybe, the extension can even be used for the task if it is installed. I do not recommend to make Extension:Draft a prerequisite of Extension:UploadWizard, but suggest to use it if possible if avalable, or otherwise find another way to protect against information loss.
I think you are a bit confused how it works. The back button is not disabled, it's that the UploadWizard is all on one page and has an interface reminiscent of separate pages. The problem is not to recover from a broken publish by going backwards; it's to give the user the opportunity to recover by retrying to giving up. This is already a planned feature in our coming iterations. Marking this bug invalid.
You are mixing up technical implementation with user experience. Mediawiki itself is only one page, technically. All that users percieve as various pages are only parameter driven invocations of the same. Still the usual browser navigation is possible. There is certainly no need not to have that in Upload Wizard generally, only possibly lack of programming dealing with it. See e.g. Special:Preferences, which is only one page, too, and still allowing users to switch back and forth between what they mostly percieve as many separate pages without information loss. > The problem is ... to give the user the opportunity to recover > by retrying to giving up. One problem is that there is no way to recover at the moment - you can only give up, and restart from zero. The 2nd problem is that there is no way to keep typed info. The 3rd problem is that users may not understand that they always have the option to edit file pages later (and thus can easily tolerate all errors made on earlier "percieved pages")
