Mediawiki OER export
In the page on Thoughs on institutional OER contributions I argue that (among other things) having a good export of material from shared resources (like the OER Toolkit or wikieducator) is important for getting institutions to contribute. How is this requirement met by the platform used for the OER Toolkit and wikieducator?
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The OER Toolkit [1] and [2] use mediawiki. For the sake of argument, I'll just look at mediawiki, and how you might retrieve your contributions from mediawiki.
Mediawiki does have an xml export (as well as pdf export via [3]). However, I shall argue that these are not usable enough for a typical OER author make good use of them. Here are some issues.
It doesn't easily integrate with existing wiki structures (as far as I can see)
For the first issue, there is a work around, in that the category page can be entered on the Special Export page. However, it's not very user friendly. The novice OER contributer needs a simlpe button. For the other issues, the only work around seems to be to manually paste the relevant pages into the export box (or to write a script). Again: doable by a programmer, but not by your typical OER user!
This comment also holds true for the mediawiki pdf export.
XML export is of course the baseline requirement. However, for a general user, the option to have materials exported as a mini-site (in html) would be great.
It would also be nice if the CC requirement of the wiki was automatically met, e.g. by putting a list of users who contributed at the bottom of each page (e.g. ordered in the amount contributed to the page). At the moment, this is only possible by manually going through the history (or by doing some clever with the xml export).
Finally, it should also be possible to export pages together with relevant assets, such as images.
Without those features, it's not possible for a contributor to easily pull back content. Of course there are some great extensions (see below), and in time, they will hopefully accommodate comprehensive export functionality.
In my view, it's important to not overlook this - more general thoughts on Thoughs on institutional OER contributions.
In mediawiki, looked at from a more technical point of view, the structures used for
are separate from
I should be able to get all xml or a pdf file for a certain category, or a set of subpages, or all pages I am watching in one go.