Merging people's writing together doesn't seem to be as obvious as merging people's code together -- code is a means to an end, so whatever is the best solution should be merged into master. Writing is subjective, so if your paragraphs cause a merge issue, its not so simple to choose a winner.
Dear downvoter: this was a simple, helpful comment about the formatting supported by this site, and it didn't deserve your ire. Please go visit a site other than Hacker News. You are not welcome here.
At the same time it solves a collaboration issue that is limited to always online services like Google Docs.
I remember my distributed computing professor checking out his LaTeX paper from a Subversion repo that had something like 2000+ commits between himself and other collaborators.
You also have to consider that conventional version control was designed specifically for programming code where diffs are done per line (as each line in programming typically serves a single purpose, e.g. assigning a variable).
With written language however, that is typically less true. You would only put line breaks after paragraphs and such. Most of the line breaks end up being automatic margin wraps which serve no purpose other purpose than helping readability...
Unless you work in version control. What you end up doing is making each paragraph a single line which destroys readability if you don't have virtual text wrapping. Case in point: https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/blob/ma...
I think this is why formats like Markdown eat newlines, and need two consecutive newlines to produce a paragraph break. This allows you to split paragraphs in smaller chunks, sentences or sub-sentences, hopefully approaching the situation with programming code where line diffs work.
Well, basically, in the case of prose in version control, you don't want automatic merges for anything more than simple grammar or punctuation. Other than that, there's not really that much different.
I'd contrast this situation to Wikipedia, which allows unfettered access to collaboration. The benefit of MediaWiki is that people can build their changes directly on previous changes, being continually pulled into master. Alternatively, Wikipedia suffers from authorities having less weight than experienced editors with little domain knowledge (and constant fights against vandalism, esp. on trending articles).
There is a likely a middle-ground between Wikipedia's open editing, and GitHub's "what does it really mean to fork a story and make a pull request." Interesting experiment none-the-less for Wired.
This actually kind of annoys me. When I worked in that very same Wired office, I was constantly trying to get the (fairly tech savvy) writers to use git for their drafts and then just push to Wordpress when they had a final version. They never thought it would work.
Well, I'm just glad they finally saw the light.
I can't wait until we can convince congress to publish laws this way. Imagine if you could see which congrescritter made each change with git blame?
