Best Way For a Team of Writers and Editors to Collaborate Online
April 13, 2015 11:40 AM Subscribe
We're creating an e-book, and need an online platform helping a team of writers/editors to collaborate. Perhaps some variant of Wiki, unless there are jazzy new services out there I don't know about....
The project will focus on 100 countries. Each will be divided into (identically titled and structured) sub-sections covering various aspects. So that's 100 headings with 8 sections each. It will be all text - no graphics, no links, no special cases (pretty simple!). And the writers are not technical, so the platform must be simple, intuitive and enjoyable (for normals, not for geeks), without a heavy learning curve or cumbersome feature set. We want to concentrate on the content.
We Need:
Each writer working in a unique color (or other means of distinguishing).
Ability to set status for each section (including custom statuses e,g, "help, I'm stuck", etc)
Ability to easily find sections of a given status (e.g. to help stuck people)
Non-destructive editing (i.e. "delete" just adds strike-thru). So there's no need to pore over tedious "history" pages to track changes (hope this doesn't rule out all wikis)
Ability to export a clean final version (for example, deleted copy will actually disappear).
Comment and discuss a page, separate from the copy, but preferably without tediously clicking to separate discussion pages.
I lied when I said "no special cases". We'll be creating phonetic pronunciations for foreign terms, and they need to be uniquely marked (and linked to the term) upon export. Other than that, no fancy links or styles or anything like that (aside from standard bold, italic, header, etc)
The project will focus on 100 countries. Each will be divided into (identically titled and structured) sub-sections covering various aspects. So that's 100 headings with 8 sections each. It will be all text - no graphics, no links, no special cases (pretty simple!). And the writers are not technical, so the platform must be simple, intuitive and enjoyable (for normals, not for geeks), without a heavy learning curve or cumbersome feature set. We want to concentrate on the content.
We Need:
Each writer working in a unique color (or other means of distinguishing).
Ability to set status for each section (including custom statuses e,g, "help, I'm stuck", etc)
Ability to easily find sections of a given status (e.g. to help stuck people)
Non-destructive editing (i.e. "delete" just adds strike-thru). So there's no need to pore over tedious "history" pages to track changes (hope this doesn't rule out all wikis)
Ability to export a clean final version (for example, deleted copy will actually disappear).
Comment and discuss a page, separate from the copy, but preferably without tediously clicking to separate discussion pages.
I lied when I said "no special cases". We'll be creating phonetic pronunciations for foreign terms, and they need to be uniquely marked (and linked to the term) upon export. Other than that, no fancy links or styles or anything like that (aside from standard bold, italic, header, etc)
Response by poster: I thought Smartsheet was for spreadsheets? This project will mostly involve actual writing, rather than listing.
posted by Quisp Lover at 12:52 PM on April 13, 2015
posted by Quisp Lover at 12:52 PM on April 13, 2015
A wiki is one option in the "centralized repository" viewpoint, but you could also try and use a more modern source control tool like git / github to track and store changes and collaboration:
http://blog.martinfenner.org/2014/08/25/using-microsoft-word-with-git/
posted by nickggully at 12:54 PM on April 13, 2015
http://blog.martinfenner.org/2014/08/25/using-microsoft-word-with-git/
posted by nickggully at 12:54 PM on April 13, 2015
Best answer: Google Doc's is made for this....
posted by Mac-Expert at 2:13 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Mac-Expert at 2:13 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I've done projects where we needed to coordinate between about twenty people, and Google Docs worked really well for it. One nice thing is people can go through and mark up the documents with responses that don't clutter the main doc. You can also have multiple people typing at the same time, and given we were prone to shenanigans, we did almost everything you shouldn't do and still didn't manage to break it.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:56 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Deoridhe at 4:56 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
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posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:42 PM on April 13, 2015