Parser 2011/Real-time collaboration

People interested edit

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
Remove all Edit Conflicts

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.

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

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

Mark Holmquist posted to the wikitech-l list announcing a test instance of MediaWiki with an experimental extension enabling this feature: [1]