Talk:Wiki requirements

What about wrapping the already existing bits of Moodle together to create a new wiki (oh, no...not another wiki) My thinking is that we already have the following tools:

• a "standard" markup (Markdown)
• several ways to store attachments/images/binary files in various modules
• filters for multimedia, Latex, Math and the like.

Could these instances be refactored and refined then called from the wiki parser? This would avoid re-inventing the wheel(s) and simplify maintanence of system. I guess I'm suggesting a "plugin" mechanism where each of these tools could be added to Moodle and then assembled to form the wiki rather than create a monolithic and eventually cumbersome script. If all wiki pages are simply text, the wiki script will just dole out portions of each page to the proper tool. I'm imagining these tools could be used everywhere in Moodle, rather than being specific to the wiki...kind of following the unix philosophy of assembling several simpler tools to perform complicated tasks. Looking at Martin D's post outlining the must-have features, he alludes to this approach when discussing Mediawiki. Posts in other discussions have as well.

Regarding feature ideas, I would recommend folks look at Uniwakka. This "academically oriented" wiki engine has some great possibilities including support for MathML (better than latex filter for sophisticated maths?), Latex, chemistry (a personal favorite), and bibliographies; it exports/imports OpenOffice documents directly and exports Latex versions of the pages. Veeerryy nice!

Thoughts?

~Steve

The features I find myself often missing in the current Moodle Wiki are:

• editable sections/sub-pages
• in history: ability to compare two arbitrary versions

These are things I have grown used to in MediaWiki.

In the markup department I'd like to see:

• at minimum: a basic wiki-like markup as the default
• optionally: ability to define your own markup
• optionally 2: ability to define what if the default markup

I find that most cases people will use the default markup. I don't use the Markdown format although I hear great things about it from people who do use it. I wouldn't want to make the users at our site transfer to Markdown, when I didn't even mention it in the basic training sessions they participated in.

~Jussi

I have used a number of different wiki systems and some of them with students. I've tried TWiki and found that students with no knowledge of html take to it quite readily (and do understand the wiki way of makinglinks). I use different versions of Tiddlywiki but the markup drives me bonkers (eg because links use | you cannot encluse a URL inside a table). I have also helped faculty use the Moodle wiki (Moodle v 1.5.1) for class but what I don't like about it is the html editor approach. A student actually managed to crunch the wiki at one point with mangled html code pasted in from MS Word which was then edited! My favourite and what I consider to be the most flexible markup system is Xilize which at version 2 is powerful strong. There's a plugin for Jedit which I use to create web pages.

Personally, I hope that the Moodle wiki behaves more like a 'traditional' wiki with CamelCase links and a default markup system that's easy to comprehend and orthogonal (I don't much like the accent on quotes in Markdown).

For me the selling point of Moodle wiki for use in a course is the flexibility of access control -- one can configure it to be individual access or group access, etc etc. If it defaulted to a wiki like markup and were more stable (especially with Postgres back end) I and many faculty would be happy campers.

~Markpea 25 Jan 2006