Future/Real-time collaboration

People interested

• Brion
• Trevor
• Neil
• Paul Charlton
• Ashish Dubey

Potentials

Benefits

• Could greatly enhance community bonds by allowing mentors and newbies to edit together
• Get to consensus faster when editing an article
• More of a social space
• Especially good for focused groups like WikiProjects that depend on small numbers interacting intensely
• Most groups who need to collaborate fast already use Google Docs or Etherpad or some such; (the WMF does a lot already) which makes translation to public wiki form tedious. This could bring them back to public wikis

Obstacles

• Wikitext is not just formatted text, has embedded templates, parser functions, etc. etc.
• MediaWiki's model is one user : one edit.
  • Could resolve this by creation sessions owned by a user, having others join, then adding other usernames to commit comment
• If combined with visual editing, can make the software stack even more complex.

Relevant concepts

• Operational transformation -- an algorithm to manage near-simultaneous edits on the same short span of text, where many clients receive each other's manipulations in a different order but must arrive at a consistent view.
• histcomb.js -- a user script that combines multiple sequential edits by the same user in a single entry in the history log.
• MIAWiki for Real-Time Mass Collaboration, fully functional system based on AIMS and SIMS concepts
• AIMS - Atomized Information Managenet System
• SIMS - Secondary Information Management System

Status

Believed to be interesting enough to explore, not officially on the agenda.

Other pages

• Project requirements
• Project tasklist
• EtherPadWebApi

Code repository

• parsers/wikidom

History

• Over Spring 2011, Trevor & Neil picked the brains of people who did w:Apache Wave (neé Google Wave), w:Etherpad, and more. Their concepts have already influenced some of Trevor's experiments, particularly annotated text over DOM-like hierarchical nodes.

• April 21, 2011 - Talked to Etherpad-fork startup Hackpad - meeting record

• May 5-6, 2011- Hackpad engineers work in WMF offices with Neil, create quick demo of Hackpad as a host for an editing session, via a user script.

• May 10 - Project posted on Wikitech-l by Neil and Hackpad blog

• May 15 - Neil gives lightning talk at Berlin Hackathon

• June 23 - Defining user stories, deliverables

• July 1 - Neil has local etherpad hostable, needs help making the Hackpad hacks work