RTCE: Real Time Collaborative Editing

The goal of this software (generically called RTCE) is to analyze the real-time collaborative editing of an existing installation of Etherpad Lite. The software is composed of three different components: 1) db-dumper, 2) inspector, 3) preprocessor. Real-time collaborative editing is a popular way of instrumenting cooperative work on documents, in particular on the Web. Little is known in the literature yet about real-time collaborative editing usage patterns in the real world. Thank to this software we are able to study how a popular real-time collaborative editor (Etherpad) is used in the wild, digging into the edit histories of a large collection of documents (about 14 000 pads), retrieved from one of the most popular public instances of the platform, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The pad analysis is supported by a novel conceptual model that allows to label edit operations as "collaborative" or not depending on their distance-in edit position (space), edit time, or spacetime (both)-from edits made by other authors. The model is applied to classify all edits from the pad corpus.