I sometimes use a wiki in my graduate class. I call what I ask the students to do “public scholarship” – instead of developing content that only I will read, I require them to create products that will be available to other educators.
This semester I encountered a problem I think I understand but that has not been a problem before. Past projects have required students to develop their own portions of the wiki. This time, I divided students into 2-3 person groups and asked them to work together. What are the odds that in the time frame of a week two individuals will decide to connect at the same time, wait until they have entered a considerable amount of content, and then save? Evidently, the outcome is more probable than I would have thought. If the students would have saved it would not have prevented the problem, but it would have lessened the damage.
I run MediaWiki which I regard as a fairly sophisticated product, but I cannot think of a way of preventing this problem. A system would either have to automatically lock out a second user when someone had a page open or perhaps would have to rapidly update a common file after each keystroke.
If there is a solution to this problem, I would appreciate a note.
