Editing and contributions from offline users

Generically speaking, the concept is good but has substantial technological challenges depending on the scenario:

  1. Non-internet-accessible school site, long period synchronization
    • Scenario: Synchronizes local dump at start of school year.
    • Multiple classes of students with editing integrated in the curriculum over the course of the school year.
    • End of school year synchronization of thousands of student edits to revisions now 9 months out of date
      1. High number of edit conflicts predictable
      2. Single synchronizer (school teacher?) becomes responsible for resolving each edit conflict for entire school even though xe may not have relevant knowledge.
  2. Single-user short period synchronization
    • Scenario: cellphone synchronizes weekly automated.
      1. Edit conflicts, after hand resolve, are then delayed until the next week's updating, at which point they may have developed another edit conflict.
  3. Any remote scenario
    • en.WP admins/CVN see a blast of edits from a given user/IP, especially if poorly formatted, and their likely response is to block/rollback all contributions.
    • Most such synchronizations would be effectively indistinguishable from bot edits, and may be in violation of some project's bot/automated edits policies

Some of these may be resolved via technological measures, such as a more contextual edit resolver, but it is unlikely they could be 100% resolved. I would question whether - at this stage - this should be a primary recommendation.

Amgine00:54, 12 January 2010