Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Collaborative editing

Collaborative editing

  • Problem: There is no problem at the moment, but this is an idea. See below.
  • Proposed solution: Google services, like Docs and Sheets, offer real-time collaborative editing. I love this feature, as it makes editing with others very easy and makes collaboration run smoothly. This is very difficult on Wikipedia, because two people would have to be on a call or next to each other and edit from one account. This proposal is to create collaborative editing, a system that would allow two or more editors to edit on one page at once without there being conflicts when the publish button is clicked.

    Here are some ideas of how this could work. Editors would set up some sort of group entity- I'll call it an "edit party" for now. The edit party acts as a single entity; one user would be the leader of the party, and they would navigate the party across the Wiki and click edit. Once the edit party is in edit mode, the users within the party can edit throughout the article; maybe have different colored cursors like Google Docs. Now, who presses the publish button seems like a place for disagreement, so maybe there could be a system where all the members of the party (or some percentage) must approve a "publish proposal". This would then publish the edits. When a different user makes edits and attempts to publish, an edit conflict could still be relevant, as it would be the user versus the edit party. The edit party would look like a single person in edit history pages; maybe something like "Edit Party: User:___, User:___" etc. Of course, there are a number of problems with this that would need to be worked out (max number of people in a party? Can users join cross-Wiki? Maybe have a real-time chatbox in the party? Could the party respond to threads and create articles?) but this is just an idea that I think would be beneficial to the Wikis.

  • Who would benefit: Users who desire to edit with others. Users who want to develop an article together could all pitch in and increase productivity; revising an article could take thrice as fast as it would with a single person.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: T3898, T76546, T112984
  • Proposer: MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 23:06, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • This has been investigated before and there have even been some demo's. One of the bigger unsolved problems for this so far are how exactly to do copyright attribution when people collaboratively worked on something at the same time, saved at the same time. Say we both enter a session, we both make some edits, I give permission to publish, then I leave, you change my text and make it something about several illegal acts that I would never morally support. And then you do the final save.. By whom is this text, who can be sued, whose names come up when we bring up that history ? etc etc etc. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 23:14, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you're familiar with Google Docs, it has a edit history (similar to wiki, but based on intervals of time rather than "save" button) viewer where it correctly attributes which person added/deleted text, similar to diff viewers. So only the text that one person touched would be attributed to that person. --JackFromWisconsin (talk) 00:39, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, but we have a revision system that uses wikitext, not keystrokes. So unless you want everyone to do away with wikitext as a storage method, you can't really mix those.... Perhaps you could keep a duplicate history of every single keystroke in a separate table or something but... Its not simple. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 11:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Our current thinking is similar to the proposal here, that the "host" of the edit session would be the attributed author, and all other "guests" would agree to no-attribute license their contributions to the "host" (e.g. Public Domain). ESanders (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Is it not possible to connect the edits to both, if both are still online, and to the editors still active, when others have left the session? With a new article in the process of creation this should be unproblematic. And only those in the team that set out to write it should be allowed in (others only after admittance by the active editors or the "admin" of the editing group. Group editing should end when the article is put into the normal dictionary space. — Zapyon (talk) 10:00, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is this really a large proposal? AIUI CollabPad is pretty close to being deployable. (Not sure how easy it would be for a team other than Editing to make progress on it, though.) --Tgr (talk) 02:11, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    CollabPad is a good idea for the new project, and it can be considered to be alternatives. Thingofme (talk) 16:04, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I didn't know this existed until now, thanks for showing me this. I'd love to see it get implemented, and hope this pushes for its development. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 19:10, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It’s only for VE not 2010 source though. Aaron Liu (talk) 18:30, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm curious how this might work for people who are simultaneously editing, too. Especially for current events, it can be frustrating to try to make small, quick edits to an article so that someone doesn't update the page while you're editing. I don't know how many times I've been doing a large edit, only to try to publish and find that I'm working with a historic version of the page. At that time, I need to figure out what they changed, whether it's worth saving, and how to incorporate my edit. Significa liberdade (talk) 21:44, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm pretty sure they mean you can see the cursors of everyone that's editing. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:17, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Perhaps the attribution issue could be solved with a system of "locking a part of the page" and saving regularly independent individual versions. For instance you are participing in an edit-a-thon on a single article: when someone edits a paragraph they own temporarily this paragraph and nobody else can modify it, and when this person moves its cursor outside of this paragraph their edit is saved with only this changed paragraph (or possibly with a timeout of 1 minute of inactivity). It would be a sort of medium-frequency merge (while seeing others’ independent changes), and the locking system would limit the number of small diffs (typically someone else add a letter while you are writing some sentence). The locked paragraphs could be highlighted to warn other editors that they cannot edit (for now) these parts. ~ Seb35 [^_^] 13:06, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting