On 8 November 2014 20:31, Nkansah Rexford <[email protected]> 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.html 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. [email protected] | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
