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Development:Wiki requirements

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Revision as of 04:18, 3 March 2006 by Stephen Digby (talk | contribs)

Moodle wiki purpose

To provide a way for students, teachers and other Moodle participants to create an organic, on-line document collaboratively.

Key features

  1. Pages can be created and linked using simple wiki methods.
  2. All Moodle text formats can be supported.
  3. Editing and viewing can be restricted by Moodle roles (i.e. currently, Students, Groups, Teachers).
  4. Images can be easily inserted into the text of a wiki.
  5. Attachments can be made to wiki pages.
  6. Must be fully compliant with Moodle backup and restore.
  7. Must be fully compliant with Moodle logging and activity tracking.
  8. Must provide a method of grading (see assignment module). Grading should be optional on a per-wiki basis.
  9. Allow inporting of external documents to create a wiki or add to an exiting one.
  10. Allow exporting to an external document.
  11. Allow refactoring/moving/deleting pages with appropriate permissions

(from Martin's list):

Basic Operation

Create the wiki:- Log in/ Turn editing on/ Add and activity/ Wiki - Fill in wiki parameters (Leave defaults and experiment later. Everything except the inital page fields can be changed.)

Adding pages:

- Edit the first (& only page)/ Type the name of the new page you want within square brackets/ Click Save. The new page link is displayed beside a question mark./ Click the question mark to open the new page for data entry.

- pages can be added from any page. (Suggestion: On your start page, type "PageIndex" and perhaps "Site Map" and/or "Newest Pages" so that the user is alerted to these options immediately on entering the wiki. They also appear on the "Choose wiki links" drop down at the top of the wiki window.

The wiki is one of the most powerful tools within moodle and suitable for many educational & administrative functions including:

  1. a wonderful way to encourage students to build, debate and share a summary of their course content as they work
  2. a great way to deliver your school administrative manuals i.e. teachers manual; student manuals. They are searchable, interlinked automatically & able to be continuously updated showing who, when & how the updates were made.

Currently some wiki features do not work reliably: - search does not find page titles (so make sure that the page title is repeated somewhere within the page itself). - export does not export all wiki content; delete pages and strip pages often do not work. (the most common error message is: Course Module is incorrect - moodle editor does not handle hyperlinks correctly within a wiki. i.e. All links must be manually placed within square brackets rather than embedded as HTML links.

Design Objectives

  • The Wiki should support exactly the same text formats in Moodle core as you find everywhere else (see weblib.php for standard functions, eg format_text). ie Moodle format, HTML format, Markdown, etc. Any new formats need to go in the core so they are available everywhere, and this needs to be discussed very well. We only JUST removed the old Wiki-like format to reduce confusion with the current Wiki and I don't want more of this confusion from a rushed implementation.
  • Linking should support both CamelCase and [Bracket] styles, and also automatic linking on the fly (a la Glossary).
  • Upgrading from the old system to any new one should be seamless and problem-free (this includes restoring old backups from 1.4, for example).
  • The idea with eWiki was to build on the work of the eWiki team in future. Unfortunately, so many hacks needed to be made to their monolithic script that this became almost impossible. I would like to see a lot of thought put into a very cleanly-designed architecture for the Wiki in future, something that is easy to extend and maintain (and also to use).
  • I really like MediaWiki, as this Wiki is becoming a defacto standard (for good reason) and it would be good to be compatible in some way with it. Perhaps we can use part of it as a library for us. However, the Moodle Wiki is a COMPONENT within the larger Moodle system and has a very different focus to MediaWiki (which is designed for large standalone web sites) ... much thought should be given to making our Wiki work very closely with other modules, rather than another module that tries to do everything itself. It should do exactly what it needs to do and no more.
  • Support for media in a very clean way is a must. This is probably my biggest criticism of the current eWiki version ... attaching images and video etc is really awkward and doesn't look good.

See also

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