Concurrency Awareness in a P2P Wiki System

Currently, Wikis are the most popular form of collaborative editors. Recently, some researches have been done to shift from traditional centralized architecture to fully decentralized wikis relying on peer-to-peer networks. This architecture improves scalability and fault-tolerance, but subtly changes the behavior of wiki in case of concurrent changes. While traditional wikis ensure that all wiki pages have been reviewed by, at least, a human, some pages in P2P wiki systems can be the result of an automatic merge done by the system. This forces P2P wiki systems to integrate a concurrency awareness system to notify users about the status of wiki pages. The particular context of a P2P wiki system makes traditional awareness mechanisms inadequate. In this paper, we present a new concurrency awareness mechanism designed for P2P wiki systems

Concurrency Awareness in a P2P Wiki System

Awareness, collaborative system, wiki, distributed wiki, P2PInternational audienceCurrently, Wikis are the most popular form of collaborative editors. Recently, some researches have proposed fully decentralized wikis relying on peer-to-peer networks. This new architecture subtly changes the behavior of wiki in case of concurrent changes. While traditional wikis ensure that all pages have been reviewed by a user, some pages in a P2P wiki are produced by the system through a automatic merge. To overcome this problem, this paper introduces concurrency awareness, a mechanism that makes users aware about the status of wiki pages. The particular context of a P2P wiki system makes traditional awareness mechanisms inadequate and requires the desgin of a new one

Distributed Wikis: A Survey

International audienceSUMMARY "Distributed Wiki" is a generic term covering various systems, including "peer-to-peer wiki," "mobile wiki," "offline wiki," "federated wiki" and others. Distributed wikis distribute their pages among the sites of autonomous participants to address various motivations, including high availability of data, new collaboration models and different viewpoint of subjects. Although existing systems share some common basic concepts, it is often difficult to understand the specificity of each one, the underlying complexities or the best context in which to use it. In this paper, we define, classify and characterize distributed wikis. We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available wikis, decentralized social wikis and federated wikis. We classify existing distributed wikis according to these classes. We detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. We also highlight some directions for research and opportunities for new systems with original social and technical motivations