User talk:Joe Gittings

Hi Joe, I've just read your message about Occleve and your work. It seems to be a very good idea to run wiki quizzes on a mobile phone !

This extension represented much work for me, and I think it will be the same for you. Maybe could I help you, for example to explain some parts of my code...

Concerning your wish to add an XML language question type to the quiz extension, you must keep in mind that the wikitext syntax aims at being easily understandable by humans, and XML is for computer... Therefore you can do it, but I don't think it will be integrated in the official quizzes extension on the wikiversity.

I would rather recommend you to conceive an understandable syntax wich would look like the one used in quizzes but with all features you need. That certainly will be difficult since you already did a lot of work with your current XML syntax, but your application will greatly take advantage of it, because more people will be able to use it.

Anyway, I'll not be the only one who will decide of the integration of your work in the extension. I'll ask to people involved in this extension, such as I encourage you to discuss with those guys (who speak a better english than I do). They knows a lot of things about this extension, about what is possible and what is not possible, what is user-friendly and what is not user friendly.
 * James McCormack
 * Michael Frey
 * Rob Kruhlak

I hope that my answer will be satisfying to you. Regards, Lrbabe 22:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Lrbabe,


 * Thanks for your positive reply. I'm glad you like the idea of the mobile phone client. In fact, it doesn't represent a huge mountain of work for me as I'm just modifying an existing quiz program (which already downloads from a wiki) to support new question types, and to download from them from a new wiki. But I'm sure I'll need to pick your brain at some point - cheers! :)


 * As for XML, I'd like to make the case for supporting it in some way, for these reasons:


 * It's machine-checkable. There's a wealth of GPL'd code out there for checking and validating XML. One of the items on the to-do list is a mediawiki extension to validate the XML after a quiz is edited and refuse to save the changes until the XML is valid.
 * The grammar is extensible. The DTD file specifies which tags are supported.
 * It permits easy upgrading of the content. Unknown tags can just be ignored by the software. For example, I'm currently adding audio clips to the tests. These are not supported by the current mobile phone client (0.9.2), but the extra tags do not cause the old client any problems.
 * It permits an "intelligent" testing approach. Occleve "knows" the difference between various entities like countable nouns, uncountable nouns, etc. It knows that countable nouns carry measure words in chinese, and uncountable nouns don't. Plus, a future version will enable users to test themselves only on a specific type of grammatical entity (e.g. only the verbs in a quiz...)
 * It's not all that hard. Some of the recent work on the tests here has been done by an English undergrad with no background in computing. She found it easy to get to grips with the XML format.
 * A wikitext format with the same functionality would be just as complicated. One could use template-like parameters to achieve the same thing with a wikitext-like syntax, but I don't see that it would be any less complicated!
 * I want to write some user-friendly editing extensions which will shield users from the XML. This would obviously address the question of complexity.


 * Having said all of the above, I'm not religious about these matters! It wouldn't be a problem to convert to using a wikitext-like syntax... but I think there's a strong case for XML, especially if the wiki has friendly-editing extensions in place.


 * And in any case, this is longer-term stuff... right now my focus is on adding support for wikiversity quizzes to the mobile client. :)


 * Cheers, --Joe Gittings 12:59, 12 June 2007 (UTC)