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

Hans design5 at softflow.co.uk
Wed Jan 30 03:47:17 CST 2008


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.

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

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.

3a: Adding of signatures could possibly be made automatically from the
EditForm.

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.

5. Use Profiles pages, as they can provide lists of pages an author is
involved in. http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/AuthorTracking

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

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.


  ~Hans




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list