User talk:Eloquence/Archive

User Deletion
I'm not sure if I'm correct, but there does not seem to be a mechanisim for deleting pages on wikieducator. This might not be that significant at this stage, but as I am to show others how to register, I will in the process create a few bogus accounts. These ideally would be eventually removed.

P.S. I'll copy this to Erik's talk page. --Phsi 10:20, 2 August 2006 (CEST)

Erik: i was also wondering about this myself, from my limited understanding of MediaWiki (i'm actually a MoinMoin fan, but i'm getting impressed w/ mediawiki lately) i gather that there is some way to make admins out of people. I too may have created some pages i would probably like deleted (template experiments, etc) at some point. brent 09:02, 24 December 2006 (CET)

IRC
Erik: I've created an IRC channel on Freenode -- #wikieducator. If you can point a CGI interface at it that would be great. brent 23:25, 21 January 2007 (CET)

New stuff

 * Erik - thanks for the cron job on Moodle - the email seems to be working fine as I have got notifications of all my postings. Thats great. Makes my moderation life easier
 * Hey the Web Chat link is cool - this will get participants excited tomorrow
 * Is there any demo or info on that Google summer code project re threaded discussions you mentioned the other day? Would love to take a peek.

Chat to you soon. --Mackiwg 07:02, 15 February 2007 (CET)

Erik, I like the liquid discussion stuff very much - Very COOL. This could revolutionise the wiki as an educational delivery tool. I see two kinds of application here:


 * A generic threaded discussion for wiki editing purposes
 * An interaction tool used for tutorials like the newbie tuts (OK this would need to be cohort based / class based)

How difficult would it be to associate a specified group classes assigned to a set of different forums.

How much work is still needed? Is this a $5 - 10K job or is this a 50K job. --Mackiwg 07:27, 15 February 2007 (CET)


 * Definitely $5-$10K to complete the functionality to a point that we can start using it (with a social tool like this many problems will become visible through real world usage).


 * If I understand the first question correctly, you'd like to a) form a group of users, b) associate them with a forum. There is currently a simple user group mechanism in MediaWiki which you can access through Special:Userrights. Specifically, by making a user a member of a group, you give them certain permissions. So that model would be well suited for defining classes and giving them read/write permissions in specific forums, I think. However, it would require some heavy refactoring, since the group definitions are currently completely file-based. You'd probably also want a more convenient group management UI. Worth doing for other reasons. $5K also at least, I would say.--Eloquence 07:39, 15 February 2007 (CET)

Template:ABCD
Hi Erik -- I'm a contractor for Mackiwg. Brent and I have been trying to get the Template:ABCD up and running so we can start a dialog with the Wikiversity crowd on pedagogical templates. We have not had much success. There is a slight difference between the rendering of the ColBreak template on Wikieducator in comparison to the original on Wikiversity [ColBreak] but I don't think it is the main problem. The main problem is the Expand/Collapse of the navigation bar is not working. My thoughts are that javascript needs to be enabled or some javascript/css needs to be added to WikiEducator. If you could have a look at the template we would greatly appreciate it.

Cheers Rob

Kruhly 00:57, 26 February 2007 (CET)


 * Looks great! Thanks for your time. Any idea why the tag is being rendered with "less than" and "greater than" unicode symbols instead of html?


 * Cheers Rob
 * Kruhly 23:42, 2 March 2007 (CET)


 * That does not appear to be the case for me.--Eloquence 01:19, 3 March 2007 (CET)


 * See Template:Boxed_Activity_End --Kruhly 21:10, 4 March 2007 (CET)


 * Template:ABCD seems to be broken again. From my account, the Expand/Collapse feature is only visible in the preview mode. However, it works when I'm not logged in????  --Kruhly 23:07, 4 March 2007 (CET)
 * Template:ABCD incompatible with Editing preference: "Enable section editing by right clicking
 * on section titles (JavaScript)" When I uncheck the aforementioned editing preference the template displays properly.  Kruhly 15:07, 5 March 2007 (CET)


 * That's funky indeed; I suspect our code is simply a bit messed up here. We should probably rebuild the thing from scratch without Wikiversity's templates. Wikiversity runs HTML-Tidy, which fixes broken tags, so some things that work there are not going to work here. I'll probably not be able to reproduce their setup either, since last time I checked, it was a heavily customized tidy setup.--Eloquence 03:00, 12 March 2007 (CET)


 * I tested the singleton tag (ie Template:Boxed_Activity_End) on Wikipedia as well. It renders as html like it does on Wikiversity. Also a singleton renders as html on both Wikipedia, and Wikiversity but as unicode text on WikiEd. Does the common behavior on Wikipedia and Wikiversity make it any easier to track down why it is not working on WikiEd? -- Kruhly 06:56, 16 March 2007 (CET)

Hi Erik, I just revisited the editing preferences problem with Template:ABCD. A quick look at Editing Preferences and Skins that break Template:MCQ, Template:ABCD, etc. found that enabling "Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)" in the Monobook skin is the only preference that causes problems for me (both at wikied and wikiversity). All other skins (on wikied and wikiversity) break the above templates independent of editing preferences so this seems to me like the NavHead, NavFrame, NavContent, etc are only in monobook? Any idea how we could make them common to all skins? -- Kruhly 22:54, 20 March 2007 (CET)

Wikiquiz
Hi Erik -- Would it be possible to install the following extension Wikiquiz on wikieducator so we can beta test it? Cheers Kruhly 07:54, 7 March 2007 (CET)


 * That's a pretty horrible, hackish extension. I'd have serious security reservations about installing it.--Eloquence 03:01, 12 March 2007 (CET)


 * Is there a way to put it in a sandbox so we can test it to see if it is worth improving. It seems like it has a lot of good features for educators along with some bad ones ( security, one quiz per page, ...) but it is hard to tell without testing. If not, do you have an estimate of how many development hours it would take to "clean it up"?  Kruhly 20:54, 12 March 2007 (CET)

SVG
SVG appears to be disabled on this wiki. This should be enabled. BTW we have set up a google group at http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator?hl=en which you might want to join.

--Phsi 09:08, 8 March 2007 (CET)


 * SVG should now work, using the same rendered used by Wikimedia Commons.--Eloquence 03:10, 12 March 2007 (CET)


 * SVG is working for me. Thanks. Kruhly 20:48, 12 March 2007 (CET)

Hmmm, not working properly on IE6 compare http://wikieducator.org/Image:Road_Works.svg to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Zeichen_123.svg

--Phsi 02:51, 15 March 2007 (CET)


 * The only difference I notice on FireFox is that the original has a checkerboard(white/gray) background, and the wikied version does not. I assume that the checkerboard indicates that it is a transparent background and this may have been lost when it was copied to wikied? I also seem to remember that IE7 was the first version to support SVG natively but I could be wrong. I hope it helps.  -- Kruhly 05:20, 15 March 2007 (CET)


 * The images you are actually seeing are rendered PNGs, not SVGs. IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency properly; Wikimedia may be working around this. I don't think it's worth spending time on unless there is another issue on IE6 I'm not aware of. The checkerboard background for transparency is optional; I personally find it unhelpful as it is oriented towards editors rather than users. It can be added to a user-level CSS for those who want to use it. Let me know if you need help setting this up.--Eloquence 21:32, 17 March 2007 (CET)


 * Did this get taken care of? IE supports PNG transparency through CSS using the "filter" property. --Downchuck 22:45, 14 April 2007 (CEST)

Math Markup
Can we enable Math in WikiEducator? Cheers Rob --  Kruhly 06:41, 15 March 2007 (CET)


 * Thanks! I'm assuming it was already enabled and that I was LaTeXing the end math :-( Kruhly 07:37, 24 March 2007 (CET)


 * No, it wasn't enabled yet; I installed the necessary support files.--Eloquence 03:43, 25 March 2007 (CEST)

Flash Extension
Hi Erik,

I have come to a tentative conclusion that the Flash extension will not work with the .swf file we discussed at TSTT -- independent of the because it is not the latest version.

The way the flash file is supposed to work is:

Magnifier

Magnifier

However, when it is embedded in an article, the flash extension can't append the flashvars properly:

Test Page with Magnifier

Magnifier test

So I think we need a flash extension that uses the syntax instead of appending the url Flash Extension ... the eXe website export spits out something similar to:

  when the .swf is embedded.

Cheers

Rob -- Kruhly 16:41, 15 April 2007 (CEST)


 * I know a few online/flexible learning educators who will go elsewhere if we can't get both the embed and the object tags for embedding Flash video into WikiEducator. brent 17:44, 14 April 2007 (CEST)


 * Okay, I learned something new today :-) You can append the flashvars using the ?var1=value1&var2=value2 syntax to a .swf movie for an and to a src for the tag. Then you don't need to explicitly mention FlashVars. So the problems I have been having are most likely due to the fact that we don't have the 1.0 version of the flash extension. Specific to my use of magnifier.swf there may also be a problem with the path to the image file to be loaded by the .swf file. --  Kruhly 07:03, 15 April 2007 (CEST)


 * Updated now.--Eloquence 18:43, 21 May 2007 (CEST)


 * Thanks! Just what the doctor ordered Sandbox and Brent I think it uses both embed and object -- Kruhly 09:11, 23 May 2007 (CEST)

New Version of Wiki Quiz
Hi Erik,

There is a new version of wiki quiz available -- I think it is 0.81 0.9.2 or similar. Could you update our version 0.7b so I can test some of the new features? Thanks -- Kruhly 01:24, 24 April 2007 (CEST)


 * Version 1.0 is out. Could you please install it on WikiEd? Thanks -- Kruhly 08:49, 8 May 2007 (CEST)


 * Running now.--Eloquence 18:43, 21 May 2007 (CEST)

User CSS/JS
I was reading the help on user styles and found that user CSS/JS are ignored in the default configuration and to allow user CSS/JS the following must be set in LocalSetting.php :

$wgAllowUserJs = true; $wgAllowUserCss = true;

Can you check if they are set to true and, if not, can you set them to true? Thanks for your help. --Kruhly 08:21, 13 May 2007 (CEST)


 * Enabled now.--Eloquence 18:43, 21 May 2007 (CEST)

A bug?
Link appears to be a problem - page exists, & clearing / purging the cache does not seem to fix this.

User:Ktucker

I've had the following problem with the web chat:

I am using Dial-up and it takes a year and some to open the page.

I want to know how to access the off line option described in thg eMedia section of the tutorials: "If you're using a low bandwidth connection to the Internet skip the audio message and arrange for an off line version of the multimedia files"