OER in Education:Documentation

Introduction

This page documents the setup of this wiki, with particular attention to non-standard features. Some of these changes were made with the help of funding from the Wikimedia Foundation UK, see EWTE, which also provides a narrative and rationale for some of the changes made.

General setup

The current wiki version and installed extensions are available on the usual page Special:Version.

Speed optimisation:

• Optimise the page delivering (more caching)
• Search engine crawling restrictions

Usability:

• Reconfigure the search feature
• Setup social extensions working with togetherJS
• Setup new OCG toolchain with Collection extension (still buggy) (for pdf generation)
• Configure solution for article section prefixing

Offline:

• Setup automatic ZIM generation toolchain

Optimisation and upgrading

Reconfigure the mediawiki in a way it make it easy to upgrade

• Includes re-configuring the css to be contained in “Mediawiki:Vector.css”
• Setup the scripts to backup/upgrade easily ← need to document how we can do these updates, including OCG tool chain.

Mediawiki backup & upgrade

OER server has an all-in-one solution to backup the MW instance and replace the MW code by an other (newer one). To achieve to do this, the script only needs a master directory with the newer Mediawiki (with a configured LocalSettings.php and all necessaries extensions. The script is localised current at /home/kelson/updateMediawikiInstance.pl (call it without argument to learn how to use it). The code repository of this script is here.

To update OCG, Parsoid, mwoffliner and Semantic Mediawiki you should refer to the original documentation.

Caching

OER use a few technics to improve responsiveness of the web site:

• Memcached to cache the rendered HTML (see /var/www/w/LocalSettings.php)
• Nginx customized virtual host configuration (see /etc/nginx/site-availables/oer)

Robots

Have a look to the robots.txt file.

Incremental backup

The incremental backup is done every day using rsnapshot (and a cron entry).

Custom extensions

OER has a few extensions which are non-standard or/and lightly customized. They are available on our server in /var/www/custom/extensions/, and can also be obtained from github, see OER:Documentation/customextensions.

Usabilty and accessː Offline

ZIM generation

One time a month a new ZIM file of OER is generated automatically using mwoffliner (and crontab, zimwriterfs, ...)

Usabilityː General

Search

How did we do this? → See LocalSettings.custom.php and “../custom/extensions” directory.

Social tools

We have installed TogetherJS on OER using the TogetherJS Mediawiki extension.

Usabilityː Navigation

Project navigation: Page banners

Project specific page banners. On our wiki, different "projects" have different “page banners”, i.e. a section at the top of the page that identifies the project. Compare e.g. http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT, and http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools. In order for projects to choose to place their outputs on a departmental site (let alone a University wide, or wikibooks), they need to have their own identity within that site. Otherwise it is simply not acceptable to project stake holders. We have an existing mechanism for this, but it uses the 'site notice’, so we cannot have site notices, and it relies on an actual source code modification, which makes it difficult for us to upgrade.

Navigation page collections

Collection extension

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bjohas/Books/Dolphin
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bjohas/Books/Dolphin/test

Wiki navigation between pages. We currently have a mechanism (relying on the semantic extension) that allows several wiki pages to be grouped into a collection, displaying a navigation menu on each page, see e.g. http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools/Questioning#menuexpand. We would like to assess our implementation of this, and optimise it.

Creating Navigation

<noinclude>{{saved book |title= |subtitle= |cover-image= |cover-color=}} </noinclude> :[[Dolphin]] :[[Toothed whale]]

Section Number Prefixing

Section numbers. When creating longer documents, it is important that each section has a unique number. We would like to be able to prefix the usual page section numbers (1, 2, 3, …) with a chapter number (say “5”, to give 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, …; or say “A”, to give A.1, A.2, A.3).

• <null>1 → Appendix A - 1
• <null>1.1 → Appendix A - 1.1

The use of our longer documents (sometimes numbering 100s of printed pages) has been confusing during e.g. during workshops because of the lack of unique section numbers across several pages. (“Let’s look at chapter 5, section 3.” - “No, not this section 3, go to chapter 5 first, then section 3.” vs. “Let’s look at section 5.3.”).

The OER Mediawiki is configured in a way to allow to specify a prefix before section titles. This prefix can be set using the Template:SectionPrefix and use the extension:CSS.

Future work

• Potential hackathon
  • Investigate improvements to OER4S-ZIM
  • Investigate improvements to OCG and pdf.
  • Add documentation to wiki for various tools (such as collabJS), as well as basic wiki editing info… Where’s a course on wiki editing?
• Explore collab editor.

Also we are running an event for Faculty, focussing on content production with these new tools (such as visual editor, navigation, etc).

Also see

EWTE