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."

Comments

What about other systems like...

[CrypticSpawn]

Whats the difference from that and these?

NASA System
Diracian

Re:Slashdot

[Threni]

"Could this be used on /. to fix spelling mistakes and other obvious errors? :) "

No, for that you'd need a spelling checker, which is beyond our puny 2003 tech. It's the stuff of madmen's dreams.

Same goes for dupes. Just too hard to fix. Well, apart from going a quick keyword search on the new headline and all the headlines from the last 3 weeks.

Writing by a committee

[October_30th]

Great.

A perfect tool for producing ediocre text.

A serious question...

[sphealey]

A serious question (as opposed to a modest proposal): has anyone ever seen a document emerge from a collaboration / groupware system better than one produced by a single knowledgable person?

I have seen a lot of computerized collaboration systems tried over the last 25 years, and I have never seen them produce a better (or even usable) product. Typically the single dedicated person with a quill pen does a better job than 50 people with $$$ of computers. Anyone else have a different experience?

sPh

Re:A serious question...

[revividus]

I believe that Bruce Eckel wrote Thinking in Java in a sort of middle-ground between 3D17 and your suggestion; that is he wrote it, posted it online, allowed anyone to comment on the text, and wound up incorporating many hundreds of corrections and suggestions into the final text. In a sense, it was something like 3D17, but he was the moderator of the suggestions/corrections that came in. He talks a bit about it here.

Also, I suppose a /. thread viewed at a threshold of 3 or 4 or higher would qualify as a collaborative commentary on whatever article is being discussed.

Of course, I realize that neither of these examples are exactly what 3D17 is suggesting, but they share elements.

Re:A serious question...

[dr_canak]

Sure,

but perhaps on a much smaller scale. My dissertation was a constant collaboration between myself, my advisor, and the two research assistants who helped with the project. We used the "Track Changes" component of MS Word which worked pretty well, but was nevertheless kind of clunky.

And we used the same MS Word "Track Changes" when we put together a couple substantial ($1,000,000+) grant proposals that involved contributions from a variety of researchers that would later go on to form the research team.

There is no question that in both cases above, the group product was vastly superior to what the key individual could do on their own. "Track Changes" was an adequate solution for our needs, but I would have been/always am happy to try new collaborative tools like this.

jeff

Re:A serious question...

[at_18]

has anyone ever seen a document emerge from a collaboration / groupware system better than one produced by a single knowledgable person?

Check out Wikipedia. It is a wiki encyclopedia, with more than 100,000 articles on lots of subjects. And growing at breakneck speed. A simple look to the Recent Changes page gets my head spinning. Maybe it's not a "document", but maybe it's even better.

Re:3D17?

[GoofyBoy]

3 = E
D = D
1 = I
7 = T

Tried it.

[Godeke]

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.

**YAWN**

[terrified]

Drupal.

Re:Slashdot (hey, here's a suggestion...)

[Thing 1]

Hey, instead of relying on spell checers, learn how to spell.

Danger, danger, pot attacking kettle!