[pmwiki-users] "Wikis at school": Measuring authors' activity/amount of contribution?
Tobias Thelen
tt at tobiasthelen.de
Wed Jan 30 18:10:57 CST 2008
Hans schrieb:
> Tuesday, January 29, 2008, 11:17:55 PM, Tobias Thelen wrote:
>
>
>> So we are still looking for some kind of mechanism to summarize an
>> author's contributions. Ideas and suggestions are still welcome.
>>
>
> Here are a few ideas. I mentioned some before, but will list them
> again:
>
> 1. Add to the RecentChanges format a var which will show the amount of
> change, preferably as a word count, or character count. I think a
> markup expression can be created for word counts or character counts.
> The information will be added to the summary appearing after each
> page modification, together with author name and summary etc.
>
This should be separated as added: x word, changed: y words, deleted: z
words. This requires a character based diff algorithms, of course as
opposed to the current paragraph based one. Anyone knows a good and
gpl'd PHP implementation of such a thing? I quite like the idea.
> 2. For comprehensive statistics create a script which analyses each
> page's history, i.e. all the diff lines, and returns quantified
> statistics of changes. If you do this, please contribute it to the
> Pmwiki community as a cookbook recipe
>
This appears to be the way to go, perhaps combined with (1). Of course
we'd share it with all of you.
> To see author involvement in a page consider these options:
>
> 3. Use signatures for every contribution. PmWiki got already signature
> markup ~~~ and ~~~~ which is converted on page save into
> [[~AuthorName]] and [[~AuthorName]] Date
> i.e. links to an Author's Profiles page.
> Such signing of contributions can as obtrusive or unobtrusive as you
> wish.
>
How do you sign deletion actions? Or actions on a lot of places all over
the page's text? Signing ist great for adding parapgraphs. but I still
hope to find a solution that doesn't need user's to remember to do the
right thing…
> 4. For highly unobtrusive signatures use conditional markup:
> (:if auth edit:)[[~AuthorName]] Date (:ifend:)
> Then signatures will only show if logged in with edit rights, but not
> for normal readers. Such markup could be added with the shortcut ~~~~
> for instance by modifying the ~~~~ markup definition.
>
same here. Where should this signature be added if I only delete text or
make minor changes in many places simultaniously?
> 5. Use Profiles pages, as they can provide lists of pages an author is
> involved in. http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/AuthorTracking
>
We tested that recipe and found it useful but not solving all
acquirements. Profile pages are great and in our settings they're not
used often enough. I think we should implement auto-creating a profile
page on first LDAP-login and insert some code to gather and display
personal info from our LMS.
> 6. You mentioned color coding before: Use wiki styles for (background)
> color coding paragraphs. You can define a wiki style for each author,
> as author name, and have this applied similar to a signature.
> See http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiStyles
>
Can this be in some way applied without additional author actions?
Expecting authors to write sth. like %myaccount%…a lot of info…%% is
unrealistic, I fear. For special scenarios, this is a great idea and
could be incorporated in a solution for (5). Each new author
automagically gets an own wikistyle…
> 7. Again this can be made unobtrusive by conditional markup:
> Install http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AllGroupHeader
> Define all author wiki styles on a central wiki page Site.AllGroupHeader
> and enclose these definitions in conditonal markup:
> (:if auth edit:)
> %define=BillJones bgcolor=#ddddff%
> %define=JaneJarvis bgcolor=#ffdddd%
> etc.
> (:ifend:)
> Then color coding will only be applied if logged in.
>
It could also be defined corresponding to a session variable like e.g.
$ShowAuthorColors - great!
Cheers,
Tobias
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