dependency links between pages to develop a learning and navigation sequence - MediaWiki-l

4 Nov 2010


      Hi,
I am at the mozilla drumbeat event, and I met some of the enthusiastic
peopel of the wikimedia there.  I discussed the following idea with
them.
The following simple idea, I think, can create a huge impact in using
wikipedia for education as well as for navigation. I seek your
comments.
* Proposal
A new infobox item for every page.
** What other pages the learner should read/learn before the current page?
The idea is to build a specific link between pages that will
   generate a learning sequence (or you wish a teaching sequence or a
   navigation sequence).
The authors of wikipedia pages will add the names of the pages that
   they think the reader of the page may need to read, if they fail to
   understand the content of the page.
** How to do this?
http://atlas.gnowledge.org started hacking a model that generates
   dependencies between activities or topics (concepts).  For example,
   you may look at the page:
   http://atlas.gnowledge.org/view_concept_activity?objid=12675&maptype=dep...
The top links of the node are the links the user could visit, and
   the bottom links are those that the user could viist after visiting
   the current page.
** How to generate a learning sequence?
The set of all the dependency links will generate a sequence or a
   road map for
   learning.
   This paper http://gnowledge.org/~nagarjun/collaborative-LTS-published-version.pdf
   introduces the idea and what are the motivations and inspirations
   of doing this.
** What wikimedia can do?
Currently http://atlas.gnowledge.org supports the following format
   for adding the dependency links between the nodes.
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
factors < multiplication;
subtraction < difference;
product < multiplication;
factors < product;
division < factors; product;
fraction < division; multiplication;
division > remainder; divisor; quotient; dividend;
brackets > order of operations;
#+END_EXAMPLE
* '<' indicates 'dependson' whereas '>' indicates 'isrequiredfor'.
    * Multiple relations in a single line are separated by semicolons ';'.
    * Do not use word processors for creating the files. Use text
editors like notepad, emacs, gedit, vi etc.
The proposal is to introduce a similar encoding that is easy for the
authors of wikipedia to suggest while they edit or create a page.
-
gn