User:Fasten/Wiki ideas

Video Wiki Player

A video wiki player could be a content player for School TV that connected video content and wiki content in a way that allowed

• to bundle video content and wiki content in one file
• to select articles offered in the video content as bookmarks during the video
• to select articles offered in the video for immediate consumption, suspending the video until the article was closed
• to edit the article content with own annotations and enhancements
• to share the edited wiki content
• linking from wiki content to "video anchors" in the video or another video (on the internet or in a local media cache/library)

The rationale is that videos (e.g. lectures) can provide a convenient and artificially interesting entrance to a topic, which can then be employed to raise further interest for the wiki content, which in turn can raise further interest for literature mentioned in the wiki content. (a slippery slope towards reading up on an advanced topic, one could say)

In case of lectures the result can be an "interactive" professor who explains what is needed when it is needed.

Implementation

Currently, there is no official standard for including metadata in Ogg containers. Implementation is still a long way off as of Quarter 3, 2007. The Xiph.Org Foundation are currently welcoming suggestions and feedback (Wikipedia)

One could probably use CMML (timed metadata) for just-in-time references to other content and encode wiki content with a tar/bzip2 codec in the same file. One could also allow Java Applets in wiki content. The player could, for instance, allow a special Java Applet to extend the player and receive events for timed metadata.

Wiki overlay

A wiki overlay could, like a stacking filesystem, read pages from two wiki instances but direct all write operations to the "top" wiki.

This way a group of pupils could be given their own instance and work on their own copy of an initial state from the "bottom" wiki. The initial state could, for instance, contain goals, tasks and content that asked for reorganization. Different groups of pupils (e.g. classes or grades) could be given the same initial state and develop it in their own wiki instance in different ways.

The reorganization work could, for instance, be equivalent to, accompany or lead to a book project. [1]

A different use of a Wiki overlay could be for correcting a text written by pupils. The overlay could contain the markup and annotations made by the tutor/teacher.

Formatting

• The wiki software could reformat text when storing an edit: Where possible sentences should be put in a single line, without line breaks in the sentence and a reliable line break at the end, which would improve the readability of differences between versions.

References

1. ^  Meta-schoolbook Writer's Guide

See also

• Technical ideas for wikis (meta.wikimedia.org)