<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Lane Lester <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:llester@info-fast.com">llester@info-fast.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="gmail_quote">I have a classroom network of 8 computers, and to see what would happen, I had students at all 8 start editing the same page. Messages cropped up saying that if a page were saved, the work done by others would be lost. So we ended up taking turns at editing and saving. Is that just the way PmWiki works, or is there a way to let students edit the same page freely?<br>
</div></blockquote><div><br>Re-reading your message perhaps it's simply a misunderstood warning message. If more than 1 person tries to edit a page at the same time there is a cautionary warning that comes up on the edit page saying "your changes will overwrite the changes made by someone else" or something like that. While this is true technically (whoever saves last always wins) pmwiki does a very nice job of merging the changes together before it saves (it prompts you with the new version after it merges the changes). In other words if person A and person B open the file at the same time and A makes a change at the top and saves and B makes a change at the bottom and saves, person B will get a screen back with BOTH A's and B's changes and then will be prompted to save that merged version. If there are conflicting changes then they are marked relatively clearly and the editor has to edit it manually to resolve the conflict.<br>
<br>Now if you have 8 different students all editing the same page at the same time and all saving at roughly the same time then you are almost certainly going to get into a bit of a mess... Pmwiki will handle locks such that each update is done sequentially, merging changes appropriately and prompting each sequential editor to save, so technically it will all be good, but practically speaking you just can't have 8 different people editing the same page at the same time unless you expect a pretty messed up page and an awful lot of error messages and warnings...<br>
<br>Summary: Pmwiki does a very nice job of handling the occasional simultaneous edit, but practically speaking the human dimension means that many simultaneous edits are going to be a bit confusing to your students.<br><br>
-Peter<br></div></div>