Indeed Forester, your answer on the wiki research list is outstanding and
shines light on what collaborative editing entails. I really appreciate
pointing those issues out, and I fully agree.
You ended by saying
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.
My question is, is there currently a proposal to handle the issue of Edit
Conflicts for the mean time, before the holy grail wikipedia collaborative
editing concept presented at wikimania is realized?
Or, we all, new editors and old editors alike, continue to endure, most
times, the annoyance that comes with editing conflicts?
Has that actual proposal started?
I fully agree its a daunting challenge with the realtime editing thing, but
before that is achieved (perhaps maybe next 10 years time), I believe there
should be a quick 'hack' to that.
Can't wait to learn what the proposal finally is. As you explained, I don't
think the locking articles like wordpress does will be much sensible in
this wikipedia context.
thanks for your explanations
On Wednesday, November 12, 2014, James Forrester <jforrester(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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
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