Collaborative writing

The terms collaborative writing and peer collaboration refer to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team, but many grow without any top-down oversight.

Practical approaches
In a true collaboratives environment, each contributor has an equal ability to add, edit, and remove text. The writing process becomes a recursive task, where each change prompts others to make more changes. It is easier to do if the group has a specific end goal in mind, and harder if a goal is absent or vague.

A very good method of discussion and communication is essential, especially if disagreements arise.

Examples
Collaborative writing projects include:

Some collaborative writing projects are also open content.
 * co-write.me.uk A collaborative project, where authors submit their short stories, and users vote on the stories. The winning entries are published ( in print ) and sold through Amazon.co.uk (wiki) - amazon.co.uk (web) and lulu.com(wiki)-lulu.com (web). The co-write.me.uk forum is a true collaborative writing project where users can continue stories started by other users.
 * H2G2
 * Everything2
 * Ekşi Sözlük
 * New Worlds Project - Online collaborative writing project
 * adjute.com - a collaborative writing experiment
 * OOoAuthors
 * The International Writing Exchange
 * The Linux documentation project
 * Ilf and Petrov
 * Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
 * Kozma Prutkov
 * Nicolas Bourbaki
 * Trillium Report
 * Wikipedia and many other wikis (see Who writes Wikipedia)
 * Reena Spaulings (a collective novel by The Bernadette Corporation) http://www.bernadettecorporation.com/novel.htm
 * [www.relaywrite.com - Relaywrite.com is a story factory. Writers from all over the world assemble fiction stories piece by piece until they are completed.(everyone has the ability to start their own story)]

''"Collaborative writing is working in a group as small as two or as large as one can imagine to create a document. The group members can work in a synchronous environment (face to face, at the same computer, in the same classroom) or asynchronous (discussion board, email, letters). The group collectively negotiates, coordinates, researches and monitors their writing process to accomplish their task. Often group members will be assigned roles such as monitor, consultant, editor, reporter and leader to streamline the process. They will often follow a schedule of brainstorming, outlining, drafting, reviewing, revising and copy editing to produce the document. This coordinated consensus will produce many benefits. Maximum input, increased learning, varied points of view and fraternization are benefits of this style of work. It is believed this method of writing will produce a higher quality of work as opposed to a single writer/single reviewer method. Collaborative writing is utilized by members of academia, business and government."'' - Lowry Curtis Lowry, 2004

Similar and related concepts

 * coauthoring
 * collaborative authoring
 * cooperative writing
 * group writing
 * joint authoring
 * shared document collaboration
 * team writing
 * Collaborative fiction
 * Massively distributed collaboration
 * Collaborative learning