User:MaJac89/GSoC2013/ConceptualWiki

Identity
Name: Marco Jacopo Ferrarotti Email: marco[dot]ferrarotti[at]gmail[dot]com Project title: ConceptualWiki

Contact/working info
Timezone: Typical working hours:

Problem addressed
Mediawiki based websites are incredibly well suited for study and educational purpose, but in my opinion they still lack one feature which would be extremely useful in these contexts: the possibility of building a conceptual map as long as the final user navigates through related articles. Let's try to point out the problem.

Nowadays when you are facing an unknown subject, you will try to clarify your mind opening a web browser with the secret hope to find out a magical article on a wiki website. Usually you find such an article and you proceed with an algorithm that more or less sounds like this:


 * 1: when you find an unknown concept marked as inner link in that wiki -> right click -> open in a new tab;
 * 2: when you find a clarifying sentence -> try to memorize it -> bookmark the page;
 * 3: when you reach the end of the article -> pass to the next opened tab -> iterate until you are satisfied;

This kind of approach, that I personally experienced a lot of times, turns out to have several problems:
 * If you want to stop your investigation process and go on later you will feel a very strong headache trying to remember where you were;
 * In the middle of the process you will have a jungle of tabs in which you will be lost;
 * At the end nothing remains, if you would like to visualize or share your study-path simply you can't;

A possible solution
My proposal is to develop an extension for MediaWiki which can solve these problems allowing the user to create a conceptual map (as long as he navigates through related articles) with a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

The main element of the extension should be one additional entry in the side bar menu: Concepts;