I have been using ikiwiki as a collaborative notetaking tool for about seven years and really like it.

I would like to start experimenting with ikiwiki as an alternative to Google Docs and Libre/Open/MS Office for collaborating on scientific papers. A feature that would make this experiment more palatable for some of my collaborators is if the revision history for a wiki page could be visualized as in the "track changes" mode in Office, where changes from each editor are highlighted in different colors, old text is struck out and visible adjacent to the new text (similar to wdiff), and mousing over highlighted or struck-out text indicates the revision that introduced that text (i.e., the sort of information generated by git-blame). There is a similar feature in Google Docs, but (I think) limited to commits within a given time window.

I expect to have time to work on this in early 2019.

I would like to ask the ikiwiki community:

  1. Does such an ikiwiki feature already exist, or is anyone working on one (the closest I can find is the editdiff plugin)?

  2. Is this feature best implemented as a plugin or something else? Are there useful examples or bits of the ikiwiki source to take a look at?

Thank you for your time,

Mark