Explain the problem with a simple but compelling scenario, and show why the LizzyWiki approach fails there. For example:

The Problem

John creates an English page Welcome to this wiki. Pierre then translates it to French page Bienvenue à ce wiki. Later on, John adds three sentences to English page Welcome to this wiki. Now, Josée who does not speak English wants also to add two words to the French page Bienvenue à ce wiki.

With the LizzyWiki approach, Josée is not allowed to add her two words to Bienvenue à ce wiki before she has translated the ten sentences added by John to the English version Welcome to this wiki. But Josée cannot do this because she does not read English. Even if she could, she might not be in the mood to translate ten English sentences just to be allowed to add two words to the French version.

In (Désilets et al., 2006) the authors also postulated that in order to support collaborative authoring and translation in more than two languages at a time, it might be necessary to impose the use of pivot languages as intermediaries between other languages, in order to provide stable points of references in an otherwise chaotic environment.

With the CLWE project, we tried to move away from these kinds of constraints and allow authors to create original content on any linguistic version of any page, and at any time.

The solution

Describe the technical solution to this problem.

Borrow from this page Tracking Changes and from LPH's tech report.