User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Wikia's 1st Hack-a-thon/@comment-3267024-20110325102740/@comment-1997905-20110328125733

Instead of giving up when you get an edit conflict, actually merge the two edits. Not too difficult. A real time messaging system would require repetitive AJAX, which would lag horribly for people with slower connections and also strain the server. You can have automatically refreshing Recent Changes (there's a script for it), which could be adapted for WikiActivity, but likely won't because of the fact that WikiActivity is essentially useless.