Co-editing

[Martiniano]

Deki is an excellent collaboration tool and I'd like to see it go to the next level of in-the-moment collaboration. I'd like to have the ability for multiple people to edit the same page at the same time.

The co-editors would be listed on the screen with one person designated the moderator - maybe the first person to edit the page.

The moderator could pass the editing "baton" to anyone else on the list who would then take editing control. They would make their edits and then pass the baton.

Two editors could pass the baton: the moderator and whoever currently has the baton. Maybe a ghost revision could be saved with each pass of the baton. Ghost revisions would die when the co-editing session ends, only the final revision would be saved to the repository.

This would be not just wiki, but true wikiwiki collaboration. Call it DekiNOW!

[SteveB]

Welcome Martiniano!

Thx for the suggestion.

[Martiniano]

Check out SynchroEdit or Moon Edit for an example of simultaneous editing. It's a natural feature for a wiki.

[SteveB]

Thanks for the pointers. I looked at SynchroEdit a while back and it looked promising, but it has stalled since. Moon Edit is a client-side app like Groove, which doesn't help.

Keep it coming though. There is bound to be someone doing realtime, collaborative editing.

[shane]

I was wondering if there was a way to create a moderator for the deki as for example, someone makes a edit and it wasnt correct or wasnt appropiate, is there away to approve that page before it goes live?

[SteveB]

No, sorry. That's not very wiki like as it would create a bottleneck. Also, if somebody else edits the page, does that person see the original page or the one that is waiting approval? If the latter, what if the approval is denied, is the edit by the second user then lost?

[RickCogley]

In my opinion, workflow is more something you'd see in a CMS than a pure wiki. The concept of a wiki is you can roll back when something gets munged. For better or worse, it seems to be working ok for wikipedia etc.

FWIW, I was using Groove for about a year, and it had interesting co-editing features, but, what a bloated program. Very heavy due to those kinds of things, I think, and you could not even search. We started looking into wikis because of Groove's shortcomings.

I wonder how co-editing would actually work in a wiki. Maybe, a few things could be combined:

* a new view of the page that combines your editing with a diff view on the side so you can see last edits more dynamically
* more granular locking - editing does not lock the page but the line or some smaller unit

Does the section editing work that way? When you edit a section, do you lock just the section, or, is the whole page locked?

Cheers,
Rick

[SteveB]

In 1.8.3, we've added "edit merging" at the word level. There is no locking. Instead, the wiki identifies simultaneous edited pages, checks if the changes are ambiguous (e.g. I deleted a sentence, and inserted a word into it, oops), if not it merges them silently, otherwise it prefers the changes of the most recent editor and shows a warning message. Note that even if there is a conflict, all non-conflicted areas are merged already. So the conflict might boit down to a few words, which can quickly be spotted in the diff view.