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

[Tobias Thelen]

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