Collaborative editing in a MediaWiki environment

Real-time editing offers users many advantages, editing conflicts are reduced, writing minutes before and during the meeting is much more effective, and much more. However, the fact that real-time editing is now a standard requirement for a modern visual editor is primarily due to the fact that user expectations have changed with Google Docs and Confluence. The open source world has faced and continues to face the challenge of keeping up.

We have therefore extended the Wikimedia VisualEditor with real-time editing for the MediaWiki distribution BlueSpice. The result is a freely available, 100% open source solution for real-time editing, which is based on the most popular wiki software.

In this talk we will provide a first, thoroughly self-critical field report: we will show which technical problems had to be solved, we will report on use cases and initial experiences and on the impact on knowledge sharing with wikis. For example, questions of version control and accountability had to be redefined. Was it worth the effort? Definitely.