Re: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec

[Arle Lommel <arle@lisa.org>]

Title: Re: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec

Hi all,

at LISA we use wikis internally for a lot of communication, and have found them vastly superior to Word for the authoring phase of documents because they eliminate the frequent problem of multiple people working from different versions of documents and moving in different directions.

If anyone wants to see how wikis work, go to Wikipedia and look up some of those pages. You can contribute your own content to almost any of the pages, and you can edit them, but they can also be rolled back. That is probably the single most significant deployment of wiki anywhere.

The drawbacks of wikis are that they are more cumbersome to edit than a Word doc, and that it is a new technology that people have to learn. That said, for most basic editing, wiki syntax is very simple and you could learn it in a matter of minutes for simple edits. More complex edits can require more learning, but should not be bad. 

An additional potential drawback is that most wikis do not have the capability of exporting into other formats cleanly (and may even produce “strange” HTML), which means that it is usually best to strip all formatting and reapply in the target format after the text is completed, which can be time-consuming. However, if the group is comfortable maintaining only electronic HTML copy on the web for the spec’s master, then there is no problem with using the wiki, which becomes, effectively, a simple CMS with an integrated authoring environment, and the document can be deployed on the web.

-Arle


Reynolds, Peter <Peter.Reynolds@bowneglobal.ie> scripsit

Hi Magnus, Stephen, All,

I was waiting for Reinhard to have a look at this. He was the person who expressed a preference for using word rather than learning new technologies. I spoke with him on Wednesday and suggested he talk with Stephen but he was in the middle of the LRC conference which he organises so I am not sure that he got around to this. I think if we are all agreed that this would be a good system we can just go ahead with it, but I would like to hear Reinhard's comments.

Thanks,

Peter.

---

From: Magnus Martikainen [mailto:magnus@trados.com]
Sent: 24 September 2004 18:09
To: Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com; trans-ws@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec

Hi all,
 
I would suggest that we give this a try. Any other opinions? If not:

• When can we start?  
• Do we need a ballot to determine  whether we go ahead with this?
• Do we need to put together some  official guidelines? Or should we perhaps simply run with it for now and see  how it works?  
• Do we need any type of protection  for this site, to avoid external access?
  

Cheers,
Magnus
 

---

From: Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com [mailto:Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 11:20 PM
To: trans-ws@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec


Magnus,

1. The wiki supports this automatically.  When you edit and update a page, the page has a link 'Back in time' at the bottom.  You can use this to track changes, and rollback if necessary.  At present, this mechanism is pretty rudimentary, but I believe that the developers are working on something more sophisticated.
2. The notifications are handled through RSS.  Check out www.bloglines.com for a web based RSS aggregator, or FeedDemon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp) for a windows based one, if you're not familiar with RSS.  Effectively, what will happen is if you subscribe to the feed, your feed aggregator will poll it on a regular basis (say every 2 hours), and you'll see any changes there.
3 & 4.  The idea behind wikis is that everybody can add whatever they like, and that through the editing process it all gets cleaned up properly.  What I would suggest is that people put their own contributions & annotations directly onto the appropriate page, and we can remove all of this in the final publication.  The typical approach that you see in wikis is that people surround their own contribution with horizontal lines (e.g. see the note on this page: http://212.147.140.51:2500/wiki/show/requestQuote to see what I mean).

Obviously, people will have to be sensible about how they edit this, and not just change anything they want just because it suits them.

Anyway, good to hear that there is some appetite for this.

Regards,

Steve

---------------------------------------------
Stephen Flinter
Connect Global Solutions
[t] +353 (0)1 882 9038
[f] +353 (0)1 882 9050
[m] +353 87 798 1228
[e] stephen.flinter@connectcgs.com
[w] www.connectcgs.com
--------------------------------------------

  
  "Magnus  Martikainen" <magnus@trados.com>   21/09/2004  18:07     
  To  <Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com>,  <trans-ws@lists.oasis-open.org>   
  cc  
  Subject  RE: [trans-ws]  Collaborative editing of the  spec

  
    



Hi Stephen,

This is a great initiative! I am all for it, it should help us a lot to keep the specs up-to-date if everyone that identifies an issue can go in and change it directly.
But obviously with that freedom comes some responsibility, and I guess we may need to put together some guidelines for how we should work.

I am not familiar with Wiki or RSS so I have a couple of questions:
* Is it possible to track the history of the content, retrieve an “old” version, or see exactly what changes has been done and perhaps reverting to an earlier version?
* Is it possible to get notifications when content is changed and to see what changes were made?
* It could be useful to be able to do edit the content as a “change proposal” without it explicitly being part of the “official” content until it has been signed off by others. Would this be possible?
* Is it possible to annotate changes with comments explaining why they were made?

Thanks a lot for taking your time in setting this up!
Magnus

---

From: Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com [mailto:Stephen.Flinter@connectcgs.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 3:51 AM
To: trans-ws@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec
  

All,

given that a number of people are tasked with editing the spec, I thought that a collaborative environment such as a wiki might be useful.  To that end, I spent a few hours creating a wiki, and making it publically available.

Check out: http://212.147.140.51:2500

For those of you who use RSS feed aggregators, there is also as RSS feed available, so you can follow progress on the doc: http://212.147.140.51:2500/wiki/rss_with_content

The wiki engine (Instiki - www.instiki.org) is supposed to have PDF & LaTeX export functionalaity, but that appears to be broken at the moment.  However, when I get that sorted, it should mean that we can produce a printable copy of the spec directly from the wiki.

Take a look, and let me know what you think, and whether you reckon it's worth pursuing with this approach, or whether the posted/emailed Word docs are better.

Peter, if you're happy with this approach, feel free to post a link on the TransWS home page.  I'll keep the wiki server up for the duration of the development of the spec (and perhaps move it to a more permanent home if this exercise is successful).

Regards,

Steve

---------------------------------------------
Stephen Flinter
Connect Global Solutions
[t] +353 (0)1 882 9038
[f] +353 (0)1 882 9050
[m] +353 87 798 1228
[e] stephen.flinter@connectcgs.com
[w] www.connectcgs.com
--------------------------------------------

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