Collaborative editing

Collaborative editing is the editing of groups producing works together through individual contributions. Effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes.

Collaborative writing is writing done by more than one person; they may discuss what they are going to write before they start, and discuss what they have written after they finish each draft they write. The writing might be organized by dividing the writing into sub-tasks assigned to each group member, with the first part of the tasks done before the next parts, or they might work together on each task. The writing is planned, written, and revised, and more than one person is involved in at least one of those steps. Usually, discussions about the document's structure and context involve the entire group.

Most usually it is applied to textual documents or programmatic source code. Such (non-simultaneous) contributions are very efficient in time, as group members need not assemble in order to work together. Generally, managing such work requires software; the most common tools for editing documents are , and those for programming, version control systems. Most word processors are also capable of recording changes; this allows editors to work on the same document while automatically clearly labeling who contributed what changes. New writing environments such as Google Docs provide collaborative writing/editing functionalities with revision control, synchronous/asynchronous editing.

Correct access management systems can prevent duplicated information.Access management systems require access to a server, often online.Online collaboration can be more difficult due to issues such as time zones.

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