On 8 November 2014 20:31, Nkansah Rexford <nkansahrexford(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One session I really looked forward to at the
Wikimania was the one on
Visual Editor and the talk on RealTime Editing (the one presented by Erik).
Of course, I enjoyed, seeing some of the nice future goals of how realtime
editing could be possible, however with very strong huddles to overcome.
One slide pointed out the number of edit conflicts that happened in the
month of July only:
https://plus.google.com/107174506890941499078/posts/NCPzu4G5cbP
There were *120k edit conflicts of about 23k registered user accounts*
(anonymous conflicts might be higher or around this same value, or even
less)
The proposals and design concepts of how the concurrent editing could be on
Wikimedia projects were/are nice to see, and very hi-tech. However, I
considered these proposals and design concepts to be far fetched, at least,
at least, looking at how pressing the issue of edit conflicts are.
I think that that's a fair assessment. Doing real-time collaborative
editing is a quite hard engineering challenge, but it's a much bigger issue
for how our users would be affected, and working out some pretty
fundamental ways in which MediaWiki would need to change. See
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2014-September/003828…
which
I wrote a couple of months ago which outlines some of these issues.
I might be the only person that suffers from that problem, thus I ask
about. The simple solution to edit conflict in my own
opinion isn't that
complex, as at least, there's a living example of how it could be.
The WordPress* way of resolving edit conflicts, for me, at this point in
time, will look more promising and do much better than the highly advanced
concepts that were presented, which are not even near to realization, at
least for the next 5 years.
Until those concepts presented are completed, how many
more edit conflicts
should be suffered? Losing lots (or even a line of edit) of edits because
of editing conflict isn't something to take easily, at least when one has
limited time and resources, but voluntarily decided to add content to an
article.
It's a
superficially
attractive option that goes completely against the Wikimedia ethos, though.
Allowing users to lock pages so that only they can edit them is
anti-wiki. It works for WordPress because that's a totally different
product; altering this model would massively change the way that people
interact with wikis, and I'm not sure it's a reasonable change to make.
There are some useful points we're going to reach along the path to proper
real-time collaboration, however, which might be better things on which to
focus – flagging pages currently being edited, DOM diff-based edit merges
and so on.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester