Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5000
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Software developers deal with projects with millions of lines of code and collaborative writing projects deal with content on the order of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of text. I think the versioning approach used for software development is incredibly applicable to the writing process.

As a software developer I use versioning source control software (SVN, GIT, etc) to track changes between a large set of code across multiple developers. I've started writing a book (solo) and I've tackled the problem of managing thousands of lines of narrative using the same technique.

I am writing my manuscript in a glorified text editor (Notepad++) and this solution many only be applicable to this kind of approach (Word docs will be messy, in other words).

I use Unfuddle.com which has an "Issue tracking" thing that may be useful for communicated between collaborators.

I think the most important component is to have contributors consistently provide a reference number to an "Issue" when they are saving their changes. This way when you look at the issue you are dealing with, you can see all the related changes throughout your document.

There may be a learning curve for contributors to adopt some technical skills, but depending on the size of the project I think it would pay off in the ease of managing the work.

Original score: 0