Slashdot Mirror
Large Scale Collaborative Editing
An anonymous reader writes "3D17.org is a website designed to allow large-scale collaborative document editing. Unlike tools like Wiki, any changes made to a 3D17 document must go-through a moderation-like voting process to see which should be applied to the document. Possible applications include allowing a large community to draft letters, emails, and faxes in a way that everyone can contribute. 3D17 even eats its own dogfood - its FAQ can be user-modified just like any other document."
If the documents ever actually get written! The only thing more boring than documents written by committee is the process of writing a document by committee.
I'll take a wiki with revision history over a voting process any day.
Yeah, but those documents will be so boring to read that the letter from any 'large community' will have no effect on the recipient.
I imagine this would be used for documents on a much larger timescale than what we're used to. For instance, slashdot is an instant medium. But there are certainly comments that are out of place, wrong, or that the author wishes could be taken back. I see this at the far other end of the scale. No one will use this for quick communication on a large scale. But important, long standing but fluid documents would be a perfect match.
On a smaller scale, it would be useful for a 10 member board to create a fax rather quickly without too much molasses slowing them down like a multi-thousand member group.
I think it has a lot of good applications.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
3 = E
D = D
1 = I
7 = T
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
While I admit is is an early version, it appears pretty clunky. All proposed edits are simply placed in a vote list... this means that votes have to be taken quickly to prevent different useful edits from being unable to merge.
Something more like CVS would be useful, where you can have different edits on different areas going at the same time, and the vote process could merge them together. Then again, perhaps for text that isn't as useful as code. But without such a feature, it's hard to call this "massive" collaborative documents, as the pending change list could easily spiral out of control.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I have been in consulting for around 15 years, and I believe that in most instances the answer is a resounding 'NO'.
I think the only way for a better document to be created by a group is to have an exceptional moderator/coordinator at the helm, who values the solution that is in the middle of the table, rather from one of the involved parties, including himself.
Very rare indeed.
Wiki's seem good, but they miss one important aspect, structure to the documents. Details about plants neetly fall in to a number of catagories Latin/Botanical name, Common name, growing habit, etc. What I'd like to do is take wiki type concept but add more structure to the data. This could help with searching. Also some fields such as height have numeric values and it would be great to search for plants with a specific height.
Anyone come across such ideas or software which could do such a thing?
BTW I'm suprised how down most slashdotters are on colaborative documents. There are some really good colaborative encyclopedia around wikipedia Planet Math. So whats wrong with OpenContent!
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
This alludes to what is really needed, that is, a tiered editing system. The first step is a single author (or small intimate group) coming up with a first draft. Secondly, the draft is posted to the collaborative weblication to accept comments from various interested parties, but they can't vote on them for inclusion--only the authors can decide what they incorporate. Last, a close-to-final refined document is posted to go through what 3d17.org has set up. This is a basic representation of such a tiered series of edits, but I think everyone should get the gist.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Try playing around with this!
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.