The WMF folks organizing education programs around the world (where students improve Wikipedia articles as an assignment) are looking for better tools for professors to review student contribs.
One of the needs that's come up is a more user-friendly, consolidated view of all changes made by a user -- either for a timeframe, or a given page.
That is: * allow student/ page-level filtering of contribs * render a sequence of diffs, as opposed to a sequence of page titles * collapse a sequence of edits into a single diff
Brion suggested this could be done through a gadget/user script that utilizes the API. You'd fetch diffs one-by-one for each chunk via the API (can load them asynchronously onto the same page, allowing the reviewer to start on the latest or earliest edits and keep on going even while things load).
This shouldn't cause extra load versus loading the same diffs manually, but will be a lot nicer for the person reviewing it.
Any takers? This could make a big difference for getting hundreds more students to work on educational content -- it's a Good Thing. And it's probably useful in and of itself.
Erik
I was interested in this a while back too... turns out Andy Baio sponsored a contest to do just this back in 2005.
http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/
John Resig (author of jQuery) submitted this:
http://ejohn.org/projects/aniwiki/
Some months ago, I fiddled with AniWiki but didn't get it to work on current MediaWiki. Nevertheless this seems like a good place to start.
There's also this, but it needs Greasemonkey, and once again is probably broken on current MW.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/1418
On 11/10/11 1:41 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
The WMF folks organizing education programs around the world (where students improve Wikipedia articles as an assignment) are looking for better tools for professors to review student contribs.
One of the needs that's come up is a more user-friendly, consolidated view of all changes made by a user -- either for a timeframe, or a given page.
That is:
- allow student/ page-level filtering of contribs
- render a sequence of diffs, as opposed to a sequence of page titles
- collapse a sequence of edits into a single diff
Brion suggested this could be done through a gadget/user script that utilizes the API. You'd fetch diffs one-by-one for each chunk via the API (can load them asynchronously onto the same page, allowing the reviewer to start on the latest or earliest edits and keep on going even while things load).
This shouldn't cause extra load versus loading the same diffs manually, but will be a lot nicer for the person reviewing it.
Any takers? This could make a big difference for getting hundreds more students to work on educational content -- it's a Good Thing. And it's probably useful in and of itself.
Erik
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
I was interested in this a while back too... turns out Andy Baio sponsored a contest to do just this back in 2005.
Yeah, I remember those. Animating page history is cool, but not quite what the professors need for the review of students' contribs. I used the word "sequence" ambiguously -- here's what I mean:
A page like this:
Username (required): Pagename (optional): Start date (optional): End date (optional):
[ Show contributions ]
When the "Show contributions" button is pressed, we start loading diffs and rendering them below each other, like so:
Page Foo modified on timestamp
(Diff, either side-by-side or formatted/unified)
Page Bar modified on timestamp
(Diff)
Page Baz modified on timestamp
(spinner, still loading)..
...
This would allow the professors to review all edits that a student has made more quickly than manually going through their contribs, and I'm sure anyone patrolling a user's edits would find it useful.
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 21:54, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yeah, I remember those. Animating page history is cool, but not quite what the professors need for the review of students' contribs. I used the word "sequence" ambiguously -- here's what I mean:
[...]
I'm confused. What is the expected appearance when a user has edited a page more than once? do we collapse all edits for that user for a time period into one big mega diff? or is this only to show the diffs faster than they'd be able to view them by hand? (i imagine some professors may take intermediate changes into acct not just the diff from end to end of the time period)
-Jeremy
Jeremy Baron wrote:
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 21:54, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yeah, I remember those. Animating page history is cool, but not quite what the professors need for the review of students' contribs. I used the word "sequence" ambiguously -- here's what I mean:
[...]
I'm confused. What is the expected appearance when a user has edited a page more than once? do we collapse all edits for that user for a time period into one big mega diff? or is this only to show the diffs faster than they'd be able to view them by hand? (i imagine some professors may take intermediate changes into acct not just the diff from end to end of the time period)
-Jeremy
IMHO, if they are contiguous, collapse (perhaps showing all summaries and an option to uncollapse). For non-contiguous, show them separated, with a note like "3 edits by other people".
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
IMHO, if they are contiguous, collapse (perhaps showing all summaries and an option to uncollapse). For non-contiguous, show them separated, with a note like "3 edits by other people".
That sounds right to me.
I've added a few more notes here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gadget_Kitchen/Requests
(This is a new page and part of my nefarious efforts to create centralized spaces for gadget development. I'll post it to the en.wp user scripts wikiproject as well.)
Thanks for any help with this one, Erik
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org