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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Simultaneous editing with CollabPad

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Simultaneous editing with CollabPad

NoN This proposal duplicates Simultaneous editing

  • Problem: We have a really exciting, highly usable prototype of simultaneous collaborative editing, in the form of CollabPad. This recent hack-a-thon project lets multiple users edit the same page with VisualEditor, communicate via comments, and get a good-enough approximation of the kinds of real-time collaboration that we usually turn to Google Docs or etherpad for. It seems really close to being usable for real wiki work — edit-a-thons, collaborative drafting of new articles, etc. — as long as there is a basic way to save the CollabPad edits back to a conventional revision and provide attribution to everyone who made edits.
    Here's a live example CollabPad, and here's where you can start your own pad. (This server is just for testing purposes, and content could be reset at any time.)
  • Who would benefit: Edit-a-thon organizers and participants, editors of time-sensitive or breaking news topics, student editors working in groups, and more.
  • Proposed solution: Finish up the necessary improvements to allow basic usage of CollabPad for collaborating on new articles at edit-a-thons. (Initially limiting usage to new articles could provide a way to bypass some of the trickier problems like dealing with conventional edits that happen in the middle of a collaborative editing session. Initially limiting the creation of new pads and their export to conventional pages to user with advanced rights, such as the 'event coordinator' right commonly give to edit-a-thon organizers, could bypass some of the abuse-handling issues that would need to be solved for more general usage.)
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Ragesoss (talk) 17:31, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

See also the overlapping proposal "Simultaneous editing"; I thought a more specific one would be useful for exploring this one particular possible solution to the simultaneous editing problem.--Ragesoss (talk) 17:31, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ragesoss and all: Unfortunately, this proposal is too big for the Community Tech team to take on. I know that CollabPad has a great demo, but the reason why it hasn't been implemented yet is because it's really big and complicated. :) I'm going to archive this proposal; sorry to disappoint you. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 02:09, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]