Can anyone recommend a Free Code platform for collaborative authoring?
I'd like to be able to write a book in a sort of wiki - with a wiki page for each book page - which trusted contributors can edit. Plus an ability for anyone to comment on each page, using an account on the platform.
Bonus points if the WIP is federated over ActivityPub, and people can use their fediverse accounts to comment. Allowing a broad range of contributions while using fediverse moderation tools to reduce noise.
@strypey
I'm sorry, I don't want to bother you. I read all of the comments.
Still wiki.js is not like Google Docs or MediaWiki. It even comes with a commenting feature: https://docs.requarks.io/comments, sorry that I didn't point this out in the original reply.
IMHO, it looks like a fit for your requirements:
Code Platform: partially, it provides sync with #git
sort of a wiki: it is a wiki
trusted contributors can edit: it provides fine grained access control
Strypey if you think of your book as code, like md, latex, rst or asciidoc you can use any code repository to collaborate, like these that Liam recommended.
You can use something like pandoc or mdbook or astro to turn your book into html or pdf or whatever. I'm liking mdbook and Astro (depending on target audience and book features). Every edit appears on a Web URL in seconds.
Asciidoc and asciidoctor is good too. I just hate Ruby.
@liamdiprose@strypey
Looks powerful... probably a little too powerful for me. I can barely remember the syntax for markup languages I use daily: HTML CSS MD ASCIIDOC
I get the logic, but I haven't seen a code forge where text files can be commented on, as well as edited. Maybe a blogging platform is closer to what I'm looking for? WP, for example, allows for comments and multiple editors, and has an official AP plugin. But I'm not sure how you'd navigate a series of book pages in an interface designed for chronological posts.
@strypey I would advise against storing your work in a database or an opaque binary form: keep it text, in a git repository so you can rollback, work offline, and merge conflicting edits.
You can split sections off into separate files to make arrangement easier. You want the numbering of sections/pages/references to update automatically, which requires code.
I should confirm you know about LaTeX, which is what many books used.
@strypey@liamdiprose@hobs Right. I've used source control products to collaboratively write documents in LaTeX, so I'm philosophically sympathetic to the suggestions being made here, but I don't think they're really appropriate for the use case described in the OP.
LaTeX is great, but it has a steep learning curve and is not widely known outside of certain STEM fields (and even then it seems to mostly be used among researchers).
Source control tools are probably the most powerful solution for collaboratively editing documents, but they also have a steep learning curve and are not really known by non-programmers. I've even had issues getting STEM folks to really wrap their heads around it.
While you can use an issue tracker or similar mechanisms to track meta-discussions among authors, this is, again, not the natural way people are used to doing this if they are not programmers.
It sounds like the intended use case is to have collaboration with a wide range of authors, which seems to make the foregoing deal killers (unless they're all scientists who write code or something).
I'm guessing some of the suggestions like asciidoc or pandoc are a bit more on target, but a solution that presents more user interface for contributions and comments seems more ideal. I don't have a strong suggestion, but I did think about Wikibooks as one possibility (but not necessarily the best one). I think that just uses MediaWiki but maybe with some specific customizations.
@strypey@liamdiprose@hobs Yes, that's the Wikibooks I was referring to. I think right tool depends on your intended community of authors. If they were all, say, mathematicians or computer scientists, then LaTeX + Git could be a great solution. If you instead want people to collaboratively right about history, then it would probably be a terrible solution, because they would find it too opaque. What is your intended community of collaborators?
As for git, given that even many programmers complain about how opaque and complex it can be, it's not a tool that I would spring on anyone without a programming or math background, personally.
@internic
> As for git, given that even many programmers complain about how opaque and complex it can be
How opaque and complex Git is depends entirely on what kind of interface is wrapped around it. Web forges make it accessible to a lot more people than its default CLI. It's a shame PenFlip is gone, because it demonstrated how a thoughtfully-designed interface for collaborating on text can make it accessible to an even broader range of people.
It's a shame the WayBack Machine doesn't archive copies of complex web apps in a way that demonstrates how the interface works (AFAIK). Because PenFlip did a great job.
@internic
Think about how opaque and complex WordPress would be if you had to type commands into a CLI to alter the database. Or if it had a web interface oprimised for writing technical documentation, instead of for blogging.
@strypey@liamdiprose
I hear you. It's a trade-off. Most git providers have an issue tracker that allows anyone to comment on text files and even suggest changes to a line of "code". And you can see the progression history of edits by each author or over time. It's probably overkill for you. But I love gitlab (especially the merge review diff view and suggested changes) for documentation markdown files and company blog posts edited by the team collaboratively.
I'm pretty comfortable with web forges, but I worry that the interfaces are hard for casual text contributors to navigate. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but if there's anything optimised for collaborative text authoring, that would probably be more accessible.
> if you want an anyone-can-edit model, why not host a wiki instead?
Explained in the OP. A wiki doesn't allow comments, only edits. Yes, talk pages exist in MediaWiki (and maybe others), but blog-style chronological comments under (or alongside) the text being commented on would be better HX IMHO.
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