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

Wikindx filter for Moodle

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? Yes, endnote/footnote styles are available as well.

Note from DS: No, at present the Wikindx filter simply displays the text "wikindx:646" (for example). It's a very simple start and I hope that people with more knowledge of Wikindx will be able to modify it to extract the properly-formatted reference direct from Wikindx. If wikindx had a system whereby a certain URL call would supply the reference text in whatever style was configured for wikindx, this would be a good way to display the citation nicely within Moodle. Does such a call exist? I don't think so. Something like mywikindx.com/index.php?action=resourceGrabCitation&id=501 would be required.

Note from JB: As the wikindx admin can set the default bibliographic style in the config, the filter will just present that style. The filter is simple but oh so useful! So when I type wikindx:1 into my moodle installation, it creates an automatic link to http://www.baillie.org.uk/wikindx//index.php?action=resourceView&id=1

Note from MG: action=resourceGrabCitation can be added and the default citation formatting applied. A possible gotcha in that there may be a problem with footnote/endnote style citation is that not only would you need the footnote marker (e.g. [1]) but you would also need the full reference to be appended to the text as a footnote (I'm assuming this is required rather than just using [1] as a hyperlink to the wikindx resource -- presumably you would want to use the same strict referencing that students are required to use). Hence, in this case, the returned values would consist of two values -- one the citation to be hyperlinked and the other the full reference to be appended.

Note from MG: In wikindx, inserting a citation into metadata or the word processor involves clicking on an icon which opens a popup. In this, there is a select box listing short entries of all available resources and some text fields for users to enter cited page numbers. Perhaps something similar could be used in the moodle wikindx filter to avoid the hassle of having to look up the wikindx resource id before entering it into moodle. This pop-up could also list the available citation/bibliographic styles on the wikindx allowing the user to select the style with which the citation should be formatted prior to insertion into moodle.

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.

Note from MG: Adding the appropriate buttons would be my suggestion. In wikindx, citations are added by the popup automatically adding something like

[cite]146:22-23[/cite]

where 146 is the resource ID in the database and 22-23 are the page nos. This can be added via a cite button or will be appended to an inserted quotation/paraphrase via the wikindx 'insert metadata' button. Footnotes (i.e. parenthetical thoughts as opposed to citation footnotes - WIKINDX does handle those footnotes/endnotes as well) are inserted via a button which encloses the inserted footnote in:

[footnote]....[/footnote]

Exporting to RTF, the cite tags are substituted with the formatted citation marker (in-text or footnote/endnote), bibliographic information is extracted and appended to a bibliography and footnote tags are converted to RTF footnotes. Of course, all HTML code (font/text formatting, tables, lists, images etc.) are converted to their appropriate RTF code too.

5. Re the citation/bibliographic formatting, the PHP code for this has been extracted from wikindx and made available to other OSS apps at http://bibliophile.sourceforge.net (I think Aigaion and Bibliograph use it or are about to) so it may be easy enough for Moodle to use this too. In fact doubly easy if moodle interfaces with a wikindx because the quickest way to set up the formatting engine is to provide data to it in exactly the same PHP associative array that wikindx natively expects.