[Re-sending as it bounced first time.]
On 25 September 2014 22:45, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> FWIW there were sessions at Wikimania about concurrent editing. I think
> there is community support for the concept. If it helps us retain good
> faith new editors then that is another good reason to press foward on this
> subject. Perhaps James Forrester can provide an update on the outlook for
> concurrent editing capability.
>
Hey.
[This is a bit off-topic for wiki-research-l, but I've been asked to
answer.]
First things first: There aren't any plans right now to try to roll this
out any time soon.
Collaborative real-time editing is an interesting task in terms of
engineering, but an exceptional challenge in terms of product. I think that
it's reasonable to talk about it as a possible solution to issues, but the
number of problems it raises is so great that people should be careful to
not talk of it as some magic pixie dust. :-)
For a couple of brief examples:
If the objective is to prevent all edit conflicts by making parallel edits
them impossible, this means either:
* everyone has to use the collaborative editor;
* people who can't use the collaborative editor (e.g. old computer, slow
network, no JavaScript, etc.) can't edit at all;
* people who don't like the collaborative editor are unable to edit ever
again; and
* bots can't edit at all (because they can't react to prompts from other
users)
… or:
* you have to choose to use the collaborative editor for each edit (how do
newbies know, or is it opt-out somehow?)
* as soon as someone wants to edit an article collaboratively, everyone
else's edits die and they're told so (or they all have to wait for the
collaborative edit session to end and then manually resolve the edit
conflict);
* for people who can't or don't want to use the collaborative editor, and
all bots, the article is essentially locked from their editing until the
collaborative edit is finished.
Neither of these are great options.
If instead we're happy to keep having edit conflicts, we can allow
parallel edits, but then the benefit for newbies (and, frankly, the rest of
us) goes away the second your collaborative edit conflicts with a
non-collaborative edit. Whoops.
Say that we've decided on a course of action for the above, maybe by
biting the bullet and denying people with older computers *etc.* the
ability to edit (which I think would be sad and a dereliction of
our values); what do you do when there are too many parallel editors of an
article?
When you're editing in a real-time collaborative editor, that means you see
the edits of each of the participants, alongside their cursors/selections
and comments in the chat system if there is one (which there normally is).
When there's two or three of these, it's relatively easy to see what's
happening. But what if there are 1,000 people trying to edit the article at
once (e.g. the article of a very famous individual just after they've died
unexpectedly; think Michael Jackson or Robin Williams). Showing 1,000
cursors at once isn't just unhelpful – the level of traffic would probably
kill most users' browsers. Consequently, there needs to be a limit somehow
on the number of participants; maybe call it 10.
So, what happens when you click edit on an article where 10 people are
already editing?
* Do you just get told "tough"?
* Does the least-recently active editor get kicked out so you can join?
* Does this mean that all I need is 11 bots requesting to edit an article
to DoS it?
If you're a "special" user (e.g. a sysop), can you get into a collaborative
edit even if it's at the limit?
* If yes, doesn't this go against our values to place some editors above
others?
* If yes, do we just let the system "actually" cope with 11 not 10 editors,
or do we kick someone out?
* If no, how do we resolve the issues with too many editors locking an
article?
Then there are some really deep issues (more germane to this list) about
how article histories and revisions work, about the atomicity of edits and
the semantic concepts of saving, about blame maps vs. personal contribution
histories, about the concept of flagged revisions and suppressed edits,
about reversions and protected pages, and about legal matters such as
around multi-licensing and deleted edits.
The short answer is that it's a really interesting area of possibilities,
but we're going to want to work through a lot of these issues and come up
with an actual proposal about what this would mean.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
