[Mediawiki-l] New wiki tool + demo + online experiment

[Shah, Nikhil]

Markus this is really cool!

I am wondering if this tool can be used as a trivia game. Where the assumption is the answer provided in the wiki is correct and players are tested against that answer. So a bit like turning the tool around as not to validate the wiki but to quiz the user.

I am thinking, many wikis are in-house documentation tools or as educational tools (kind of textbooks) and some users are expected to go through and learn it. This kind of tool may help these individuals to evaluate their understanding.

Nikhil

-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Markus Krötzsch
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 17:36
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list; semediawiki-users at lists.sourceforge.net; swikig at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Cc: Sebastian Blohm
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] New wiki tool + demo + online experiment

Dear all,

we have a reasonably cool new MediaWiki enhancement, a demo site, and an actual online experiment where you can try it. We would like to ask you to give it a try (no setup or commitments, just clicking around online :-)

In a nutshell, we have built various "intelligent" tools that read a wiki and try to make sense of it. The tools then come up with facts that they think are stated in the wiki, and they ask users whether or not these facts are correct (this is where you come in). We did this on a Wikipedia copy:

http://test.ontoworld.org/

You can find questions at the bottom of each page (in a real wiki one could restrict them to certain pages). It's like a quiz ;-), and it should be possible to find the right answers on the related wiki pages. You can answer "don't know" if you are not sure, or you can just leave some answers blank. When you answer yes, the confirmed fact will be added to the wiki (we use Semantic MediaWiki to represent facts). You can see this as a contribution of your user-login/IP (feel free to get a user account if you want to track your contributions). The tool will also use your answers to learn how to better interpret the wiki in the future. So please have a look and answer a couple of questions.

Do not be dismayed if some suggestions of the tool are nonesense. They are in random order, and many of them are actually quite good. We will publish details about how good the tool performed overall, so please give proper answers ;-) Let us (i.e. Sebastian and me, see header) know if you have any comments/questions.

Thanks a lot!

Markus



P.S. We will publish all of the associated software soon, but we still need some testing first. Your contribution is very helpful to us! The question-extension for MediaWiki will be fairly modular, and could also be used to ask completely different questions to users, or in combination with other tools for improving the wiki. Such tools use a web interface, can run on a different server, and may use arbitrary programming languages.

--
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362        fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        www  http://korrekt.org