Multiple users editing same page in a wiki

I am hoping there is a wiki that multiple users can edit at the same time.

My goal is to have a list with their name, and then have them put a number by their name.

I would love to do this with Google Docs Spreadsheets, but my students do not have a gmail account. Instead I would install the wiki on my server (hmstechnology.com) and have it work from there.

Thanks,

Phil

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Permalink Reply by Karen Fasimpaur on March 18, 2008 at 12:09pm

MediaWiki allows for simultaneous editing. (If you're not familiar with it, this is the open source software that hosts Wikipedia and many other wikis. I used it for several of my wikis and love it.)

Wikispaces does not accommodate this:

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Permalink Reply by Karen Fasimpaur on March 26, 2008 at 12:20pm

I did a little more research on how Wikispaces handles simultaneous editing, since they say that they support this. Here is what I found out: They do merge changes, but apparently the system is somewhat sensitive as to what it can merge. (See http://www.wikispaces.com/message/view/features/3423477.) One solution might be to structure pages with this in mind.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on March 18, 2008 at 3:48pm

I'm laughing. We did a huge wiki on Pirates in the fall with 45 kids involved. They were in three different classes which help some but on the days there were 20+ in the class we'd yell across the room "Anybody editing such and such page?" Several times we'd get a popup that said "a recent version of the document has been detected". We'd never know how recent that version was. We used Wikispaces and you can see the Pirate Wiki here.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Kennedy on March 18, 2008 at 5:34pm

Nancy, I ran into the same problem with a wiki I did with 10th graders. The topic was Genetically Modified Foods and we had 270 members. Luckily only about 25 in each class. It was a nightmare until we came up with a system where only one student was modifying a page at a time much the way you did. In the end, it worked out pretty well.

Lately I have been looking at Wikidot. Its free, no ads, and (this is the best part) when you begin to edit a page it is locked until you Save it. No more over-writes. Not quite simultaneous editing but very effective nonetheless.

I looked at the Mediawiki software, and found its requirements were fairly steep. It needed new versions of MySQL and PHP than I have on my Linux server. When I update this summer, I will take another look. I liked the feature set.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Fasimpaur on March 18, 2008 at 5:41pm

We've set up Mediawiki at several schools and it wasn't too difficult. You can install it on a Windows server. (It does require PHP, Apache or IIS, and MySQL.)

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Permalink Reply by Tom Kennedy on March 18, 2008 at 6:05pm

Hi Karen. We don't have Windows servers in my district, other than an Active Directory server. We run mostly Apple X Serve and Linux. My server is running quite a few applications: Moodle, Wordpress, Dokuwiki, phpBB, etc and I am a little nervous about updating to newer versions of the underlying components (php/msql.) I don't have the time to fix things if the new version "breaks" anything. I do want to try Mediawiki. Thanks. (PS. We'll have to talk about handhelds some time...)

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Permalink Reply by Karen Fasimpaur on March 19, 2008 at 9:12am

Ha! Sounds like you know more about this all than I do. I do understand not wanting to break anything that's working.:)

I could talk about handhelds all day.;)