Google document is
one of the best examples which employed file sharing technique to help people
work together. Many people in publishing house or news agency find it is very
convenient to use Google doc for writing a paper with many people’s
contributions. With Google doc, multiple people can share a file with not only
read right, but also editing right the same time. This is a very convenient and
evolutionary function for people’s cooperation. However, this kind of file
sharing will always meet with problems as conflicts. For example, if two people
are editing the different paragraphs of an article and then when they want to
save the file the same time, conflict happens since what they want to save are
different? Google document use a version
control system to handle this scenario, which means each people will keep a
local version of the file and when multiple user want to save the file at the
same time, Google document will perform a “merge” operation to combine various
version to be a new version in common. If the same part of the article is
editing by more than one people in different ways simultaneously, then there
will be an unresolved conflict which might lead to a meaningful discussion between
writers.
from www.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia is another good example, which employs file
sharing to well organize people’s wisdom across the world. It is just like a
very huge dictionary, while the content is dynamically updated. When there is a
new term being added, a new file is created and shared to all other visitors.
People with good knowledge of the term can enrich the content and all other readers
will benefit from it. No one can be expert in every side of life, while Wikipedia
brings all experts’ specific knowledge together and shares to the whole
community for free. However, how to
determine the quality of the contents will be a much more complex problem than
the conflicts as we discussed above in Google doc, since there might not be a
unique “merged” result for some term. Today’s Wikipedia will depend on a committee
with several specialists to determine which editing is good and which are not.
It is not yet an idea solution due to many limitations, such as how to find a
good committee and how to handle mass information efficiently. However, after
years of year’s accumulation, the content will be tuned to be more and more
near to the reality or the consensus of most people.
To summary in brief, file sharing can not only be used for
handling sharing requirement in a multiple user computer system, but also can
be used to provide an convenient platform for people’s better working with each
other.
Websites mentioned in the blog
1. docs.google.com
2. www.wikipedia.org
Websites mentioned in the blog
1. docs.google.com
2. www.wikipedia.org
I notice that for file sharing, you tended to focus on version control and how people collaborate with each other. While this is a good topic, collaborating on a Wikipedia article is not really file sharing. There can be overlap between file sharing and collaborating on a work, of which Google Documents is a good example. Your grammar is a bit stilted in some places, which can be a bit distracting, even though your underlying ideas are good. Back to your Wikipedia example though, yes, online collaboration does naturally produce its own type of quality control, and I see that that is the idea that you were going for.
ReplyDeleteHi Jingmei,
ReplyDeleteI like your example of google docs for file sharing and collaborating. Google docs are very helpful and convenient to shares files especially when you working in a team and want to have a shared medium. I actually used google docs for one of my school team projects and found it very easy to co-ordinate and share with my team members. One feature that is really useful is the simultaneous multi-user edit.
The choice of your topic and examples you used are good. But some of your sentences are not very clear. I had to read them twice to understand your point. I advise you to use criterion. It really helps!
Hi Jingmei,
ReplyDeleteI think Wikipedia might probably not quite fall into the category of file sharing. It is more geared towards knowledge sharing. While Wikipedia does version the pages I think it is an overkill to use Wikipedia as a file sharing medium. Google docs / Dropbox or even versioning systems like Tortoise SVN or Perforce can be used where the file sharing requires that a history of the documents be maintained.
There are a few grammar mistakes but overall the content of the blog post is good.