Enhancing rich content wikis with real‐time collaboration

Abstract

SUMMARYWikis are one of the most important tools of Web 2.0 allowing users to easily edit shared data. However, wikis offer limited support for merging concurrent contributions on the same pages. Users have to manually merge concurrent changes and there is no support for an automatic merging. Real-time collaborative editing reduces conflicts as the time frame for concurrent work is very short. In this paper, we propose extending wiki systems with real-time collaboration. We propose an automatic merging solution adapted for rich content wikis. Our solution relies on an operational transformation algorithm defined for high level operations that capture user actions such as move, merge and split. Copyright c 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.KEY WORDS: CSCW; collaborative editing; operational transformation; wiki INTRODUCTIONThe Web 2.0 era is associated with the growing success of participatory collaborative tools for public users. Enterprises have integrated a part of these tools in their information systems to improve their productivity and to facilitate the emergence of a form of collective intelligence.Among these tools, wikis efficiently share and structure a large amount of knowledge. Wikis are interlinked pages of rich text. Any user can view and edit these pages. For instance, a software development team can dedicate a wiki page to the minutes of their meetings, another one to their bug reports and a last one to the progress of their development. This way, everybody can keep an eye on when is the next meeting, who will attend, the minutes of a previous meeting, what are the bugs found or fixed, and the completed work on the project. Moreover, a wiki allows fast updates and everybody can edit the content without any restriction. A wiki offers all these features in a single tool.However, most existing wiki systems such as MediaWiki do not automatically merge parallel modifications on the same page. This becomes critical when changes have to be performed very quickly. A typical example is breaking news, when it is common that hundreds of people contribute to the same related Wikipedia pages in a very short amount of time. If two users are concurrently editing the same article, when they try to save their changes, the changes of only one user are published. The other user will be presented with two versions of the wiki page: the one that the user tried to publish and the recently published version. Conflicts, i.e. concurrent changes on the same article, have to be manually resolved by users by retyping or copying and pasting the changes they performed in the last version that was published. Moreover, users are unaware of other concurrent updates on the same article until they try to publish their own changes. Resolving conflicts might become very tedious, and this can be critical when a change has to be published almost instantly. * Correspondence to: Inria Centre Nancy -Grand Est, 615 rue du Jardin Botanique, 54600 Villers-lès-Nancy, FR. Email: claudia.ignat@inria. Ignat et al. [1,2,3,4] highlight the fact that co...

Using Conflict-free Replicated Data Types to support Block Editing

“…Several research efforts have already been reported on the possibilities of collaborative block-editing, Oster et al, 2006, Ignat et al, 2017, Martin et al, 2010, Davis and Ian, 2010 or other types of collaborative editing. Our research strategy is to explore existing concepts of collaborative editing, extend selected existing ideas with block editing, and provide a unified prototype.…”

A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editors

“…Human-to-human collaboration is becoming more and more critical in modern highly dispersed organizations and teams. Computer-supported collaborative systems enable geographically separated people working together to achieve a common goal through computer networks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. These systems provide strong technical supports for human-to-human collaboration [12][13][14][15].…”