Large-Scale Collaborative Writing: Technical Challenges and Recommendations
Markus Hofbauer, Christoph Bachhuber, Christopher Kuhn, Sebastian, Schwarz, Bart Kroon, Eckehard Steinbach

TL;DR
This paper proposes a novel collaborative writing workflow combining AsciiDoc and Git, inspired by software development practices, to improve scalability, flexibility, and structure in large-scale team document creation.
Contribution
It introduces a new workflow integrating lightweight markup and version control for collaborative writing, with detailed comparisons to traditional methods.
Findings
The proposed workflow enhances scalability and flexibility.
It offers better structuring for large collaborative projects.
Compared to traditional methods, it shows significant workflow improvements.
Abstract
Collaborative writing is essential for teams that create documents together. Creating documents in large-scale collaborations is a challenging task that requires an efficient workflow. The design of such a workflow has received comparatively little attention. Conventional solutions such as working on a single Microsoft Word document or a shared online document are still widely used. In this paper, we propose a new workflow consisting of a combination of the lightweight markup language AsciiDoc together with the state-of-the-art version control system Git. The proposed process makes use of well-established workflows in the field of software development that have grown over decades. We present a detailed comparison of the proposed markup + Git workflow to Word and Word for the Web as the most prominent examples for conventional approaches.We argue that the proposed approach provides…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Software Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
