Development:Wikindx

Notes on the possible integration of WIKINDX with Moodle.

WIKINDXis a free bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system designed either for single use (on a variety of operating sytems) or multi-user collaborative use across the internet.

Please also see the Moodle Discussion at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=23022

Dan Stowell has created a "Wikindx filter" for Moodle which allows you to cross-link to a wikindx entry by typing (for example) wikindx:646. The filter is in contrib CVS, named "filter_wikindx" or can be downloaded at http://download.moodle.org/download.php/modules/filter_wikindx.zip

Outline thoughts on integration...

1. Do we need to allowing a user already logged into a Moodle site to be seamlessly logged in to a wikindx? Or maybe just use the same login details between the two (like the way that Moodle.org and MoodleDocs works). If necessary, something could be added to wikindx to enable this. In most cases though, with the right config settings, wikindx will allow any read only request without requiring login.

2. Another issue is how to integrate the paper writing function of Wikindx into Moodle. What about use of the HTML editor? Could it be integrated some way with the Netpublish module? Imagine students or professors being able to use it to write academic papers and then publish those on the Moodle site. Currently wikindx publishes papers solely to RTF. It should be simple to publish to HTML since that's what the raw document is anyway (a matter of adding HTML header/footer, formatting citations and appending bibliographies -- most of this code is already in wikindx but not (yet) made available to the word processor). Compared to other HTML editors, the only additional options wikindx offers in its version are buttons to import citations, metadata and insert footnotes. All the rest (barring stats, timestamps, save etc.) are font/text formatting.

3. For the filter above, how do you decide what bibliographic style to present in (APA, Chicago, IEEE etc.)? Presumably, this is something that could be set in the filter config file. (Although I haven't seen the filter in operation, I'm assuming it picks up a properly formatted reference for insert. Either short (Grimshaw, 2006) or long (Grimshaw, Mark N. 2006, WIKINDX [OSS].) for example. Is the only method of citation available parenthetical? Is it possible to use endnotes (or footnotes) as well?

4. Mark, your remarks in 2 have gotten me thinking. Although not everyone likes the Moodle HTML area editor that much, it still is the standard way of creating text in Moodle and perhaps a way of integrating Wikindx would be to add buttons for Wikindx to it, just like the kind described above in Wikindx's native editor. I needed to integrate a hieroglyph editor into my site and Janne Mikkonen helped me to add it through a button in the html editor that pops up a window, in which the student type the hieroglyphs they need, and then click a button to have them inserted back into the editor-similar to the way the insert image popup works. I would imagine something similar could be done with Wikindx. The advantage of this is that it would make Wikindx accessible anywhere within Moodle, rather than just as a separate module. You might also want a standalone module option whereby students could collaborate on creating bibliographies together.