We have the backend infrastructure mostly in place for real time collaborative editing. See:
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Real-time_Collaborative_Editing_with_TogetherJS
But actually rolling out collaborative editing requires more than just the Visual Editor team. It will require a coordinated effort to reimagine what editing is like. Some tentative steps were discussed at:
https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Real-Time_Collaborative_Editing
We will need mechanisms to create user groups, real time chat mechanisms, mechanisms to temporarily persist collaborative sessions, perhaps even new core mechanisms for describing revisions (at the very least, revisions can have multiple authors!). We also need to think about social mechanisms and preventing harassment and vandalism of collaborative sessions. @Pginer-WMF has sketched out a vision for the UI, but we need to achieve broad consensus on the overall direction, refine the details, and figure out how to get there from here, with a unified roadmap across design, services, and editing.
Related:
- T3898: Support real-time collaborative editing
- T76546: Provide real-time collaborative editing in VisualEditor
- T76548: Provide real-time collaboration in VisualEditor-MediaWiki
SUMMIT PLAN
- Agree on a concrete "next step", whether that is a UX experiment or a backend implementation task (support for temporary storage of in-process edits, for example).
- Discuss community implications, and develop a plan for managing harassment/abuse/etc in a real-time collaborative environment.
- Agree on broad-stroke integration of collaborative UX into our current mediawiki skin. The existing design prototypes have been built against Winter, and we need to figure out how the pieces can be built on top of the skin we actually use.