[pmwiki-users] "Wikis at school": Measuring authors' activity/amount of contribution?

[Tobias Thelen]

Hans schrieb:
> Tuesday, January 22, 2008, 11:20:54 PM, Tobias Thelen wrote:
>   
>> "How can I see (in some kind of overview) who did what and 
>> how much?"
>>     
> And it may be good to provide more information in these pages, for
> instance the size of changes or additions, perhaps as a word count.
> That information would then be available for both teachers and pupils,
> and will aid collaborative involvement, rather than remaining a tool
> for teachers to asses pupils.
>
> The idea of colour-coding for different authors I find totally contrary
> to wiki culture. It may gratify an author's ego to put his colours all
> over the place, but opposes the spirit of collaboration, which aims to
> create unified web-content, and where contributors can take pride in
> their collective achievement, rather than individual ones.
>   
First of all: Thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas! You gave us 
some good points for further discussion on the topic. Being able to cite 
an external point of views is always helpful. The assessment idea is now 
less strong but the teachers still like to have some kind of significant 
overview.

In general, I agree with you.  The pure or original or underlying »wiki 
culture« or »wiki philosophy« lessens individual authors' importance and 
provides no means to distinguish authors, assess individual achivements 
in a simple, linear way. It would hence be a bad idea to introduce 
simple looking quantitative measures to rank authors.

But I disagree on some of your conclusions. Gratifying an author's ego 
by showing "his color" in many places or giving him/her an opportunity 
to present activity indicators to the world encourages some types of 
users to become active at all. The insight that "the team is the star" 
may come later and we observed many processes that needed that kind of 
"flattering one's ego" to get rolling.

And then there are many uses of wiki that don't conform to »pure wiki 
culture«. Any kind of access control, wikis as CMS, internal team wikis 
etc. lack many aspects of the original's ideas. E.g. when we work on 
project proposals using wikis (which we do quite often and 
successfully), it is important for the final reviewer to quickly 
determine which paragraph was written by whom to address clarifying 
questions correctly. Or think of information literacy: To judge a wiki 
page's credibility it can be very helpful to have a look at it's genesis 
(the history view is one way to do so). Quickly and directly seeing »Oh, 
this paragraph was written by someone else who didn't contribute to the 
rest of the page« can be a valuable hint.

So we are still looking for some kind of mechanism to summarize an 
author's contributions. Ideas and suggestions are still welcome.

Bye,
Tobias