Thank you for joining in, Adam. I think I'll leave outputting mathematics for now. Perhaps you could start a new topic on that later? I'd also like to think about outputting functions from our anonymous wiki (aka "wikilambda"), which I'll come onto here.

I definitely agree about reading-comprehension qustions. For now, I encourage everyone who is not already familiar with it to check out https://www.deepl.com/translator. It does work on a tablet, but I found it a bit fiddly to interact with. What it allows you to do is play with its translation, choosing alternative words etc, and it reworks the rest of the translation as you go along.

When it comes to Q&A mode, that brings us back to Charles's difficult problem of re-use. (This seems to be missing here, but it's in https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/abstract-wikipedia/2020-July/000233.html.) It also brings us back to "Reasoning over ontologies" (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/abstract-wikipedia/2020-July/000206.html). Reuse is never easy, and "all the facts in all the languages at all levels" is rather a broad scope... So I certainly accept the wisdom of Charles's suggestion of a pilot project. I started with a single quiz question: "What is the atomic number of oxygen?". For many Wikipedias, if not most, the article on oxygen gives you the answer in the first sentence or two.

But we don't just want the answer, we want a quiz! Equally, maybe we don't just want the question and the answer, we want some wrong answers and some tips. We begin with a multiple choice question, as above.  "What is the atomic number of oxygen? Is it (a) "Z"; (b) "O"; (c) 16; (d) 6; (e) 8; (f) ....

The first thing to notice is that the wrong answers are not fictitious; they are values you will find in Wikidata Item Q629 (well, "Z" is nearby, in the label of the atomic number property, but no more clues!) and we can explore this further by choosing a wrong answer and provoking a response

(a) "No, "Z" is the symbol for "atomic number", not the value for oxygen.
(b) That's not oxygen's atomic number, that's its symbol.
(c) Oxygen is in group 16 on the periodic table. See if you can find it there.
(d) Well, oxygen is the sixth element in period 2...
(e) That's right! Try choosing a wrong answer, just for fun...

So we have a small number of somewhat connected facts to explore. Any of them can be turned into a question, which can pull in facts connected to that, like other elements in group 16 or period 2. This is enabled by the "quiZiverse" function that can turn a Wikidata Statement into a related set of statements, for any one of which a new related set can be produced. In an interactive context, choosing the option displays the text and could call the function again with the chosen statement in place of the original. Or the function is embedded in a link, so that, for example, clicking "group 16" calls the function withQ104567 as well as Q629, extending the quiz.

If used to set a quiz, the teacher can suppress some answers and add alternatives, tailoring the quiZiverse to the students' level and the material to cover. It is here that we need to see how to capture the teacher's thinking, the rationale for changing the "focused ontology". Was it too advanced or too simple? Difficult to understand? Irrelevant? More interesting connection to something else... and so on. That sort of metadata can then be used to guide future quiZiverse instantiations, with target values for a range of dimensions, such as "reading comprehension".

Best regards,
Al.
On Sunday, 2 August 2020, <abstract-wikipedia-request@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Comprehension questions (Adam Sobieski)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 2020 01:15:10 +0000
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract
        Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Comprehension questions
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Educational technology is also interesting here.

Generating reading comprehension questions while generating natural language articles is an interesting topic. I think that the matter would be one of refining the set of possible questions and selecting the best questions for a particular reader in a particular context. One might also find interesting the topics of intelligent tutoring systems [1] and automatic item generation [2].

We can view the automatic generation of encyclopedia articles in response to search engine queries as a type of Q&A system. Articles and their related content hyperlinks sections could be generated in search result contexts, contexts which include the question(s) that users asked a search engine to find the content. Articles, when produced with this search engine referrer information, could, in addition to highlighting relevant content, recommend follow-up questions for readers to select in a related content section, each follow-up question a hyperlink to another article (resembling a hypertext-based dialogue system). Hopefully, these related content hyperlink sections (perhaps resembling a recommender system) would entice readers to further self-directed learning.

I would like to also indicate that we should explore outputting mathematics when automatically generating encyclopedia articles. For wikitext, this could involve outputting LaTeX for MathJax to process.


Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Item_Generation

From: Grounder UK<mailto:grounderuk@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2020 12:32 PM
To: abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Comprehension questions

Thanks, Charles.

I can certainly see the possibility of many interesting use cases there. True or false questions would be an interesting game for our natural-language renderers to play, for example. Given an inferred statement supposed to be true, negate it. Test-setters might be expected to correct errors of fact or expression, but that's up to them. It would be interesting to monitor which statements they preferred to choose as True and which as False, in any event.

Questions of the form: "choose the best answer from the following" could also be a win-win if our renderers face difficulties selecting or expressing some combination of facts.

Then there is the grading of information. Questions chosen for more basic tests might be supposed to be more generally relevant than those chosen for more advanced tests, which might feed back into the emphasis in the general Wikipedia article (now complete with a slider bar for the reader's current and/or target level of understanding, as well as competence in the language).

And finally, renderer, given the pedagogue's valuable input into what is an appropriate statement of fact here, please turn it into questions in many languages!

Loving it...

Thank you again, Charles

Best regards,
Al.

Today's Topics:

   1. Re: How to store wikitext along the structured content?
      (Grounder UK)
   2. Re: Comprehension questions (Charles Matthews)
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 15:30:10 +0100 (BST)
From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com<mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com>>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of

/starts

I have been interested in edtech since 2012, when I did some work on Moodle for Wikimedia UK. The AW project has, for me, an obvious place for some educational development, and I'm dropping in the main lines of my thinking with this posting.

Firstly, it is a standard form of educational material to supply some material to read, or watch, and then some questions to answer. That can either be as a test, or as knowledge review/self-test. If AW is going to supply base code for articles - or let's say an article section - then questions could be appended in related code, and rendered together with it. For example the cloze (missing word) type of test would seem relatively easy to implement.

Granted that this sort of application of AW, in fully multilingual form, is not so hard to envisage, what needs to be said at the current stage of prototyping? A few points:

(1) There is actually no de facto standard for multiple choice questions. AW could address this gap in the market.

(2) My experience with Moodle (which is a long story) suggests to me the basic architectural point that a question database should be the hub of an edtech system.

(3) Instructional design, which is a bit more than just having an edtech content management system, is not so hard to enable. The function wiki could enable it without a big stretch, I'd think.

I don't want to write a manifesto here, just yet. On point (1) there is Moodle XML, but it is clearly too rigid and limited. Magnus Manske at http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=446 has shown what Wikibase can do in this area, with a tool Comprende! - the overlap with the subject of this posting is no coincidence.

/ends
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