Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Collaborative editing/Proposal

• 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)