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An alternative is to eschew conflict resolution altogether, and have various edits co-exist. That would basically be like the fork model on GitHub. The main issue then is how to help the user choose between competing edits. That's where metrics based on upvotes or the social network topology can help.

We have some prior work on building a peer-to-peer wiki and dealing with the issues above: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpe.3420/abstract

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That sort of forking model really doesn't work for prose. Making a fork is easy, but merging those changes with other forks to combine improvements rapidly becomes impossible -- especially if anyone tries to perform any sort of large change to an article.

There doesn't need to be a merge. Just pick the most promising version and edit it to create a new version. The old version sticks around. An add-only data structure.

How do you determine "most promising", though? Especially when many edits may not individually look like much (e.g, copyediting, fixing typos, etc), but help improve the overall quality of an aticle.

What this is likely to turn into, in practice, is a forest of dead forks. Division of effort, without a combination of progress.

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