Generating Paradata from MediaWIki

An idea from the CETIS UKOLN OER Hack Days

Who
Terry McAndrew Chris Taylor UK Centre for Bioscience - OeRBITAL OER project http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/oer/

Thoughts from OeRBITAL OER Collections project:

We're developing a MediaWiki with a number of academics (discpline consultants) to build a set of curated collections of *existing* OER on subject areas within the biosciences: http://heabiowiki.leeds.ac.uk/oerbital/

Our discipline consultants are finding, evaluating and linking to these resources within their areas on the wiki, and we are currently investigating ways in which we can export this information in an automated and sustainable manner.

Dan Rehak described different levels of data associated with a resource in his lightning talk on the Learning Registry , which included - in addition to traditional metadata - "paradata". Definition here: https://nsdlnetwork.org/stemexchange/paradata

This paradata is, in effect, what our DCs are creating within our wiki, for example: http://heabiowiki.leeds.ac.uk/oerbital/index.php/Marine_Biology

If we can find a way to lightly mark-up the content of the wiki, which will then allow the pages to be scraped by a suitable paradata app to produce a feed, that would be very advantageous.

NSDL Paradata Standard: https://nsdlnetwork.org/stemexchange/paradata

The Code
Jim Klo with the Learning Registry developed a script that performs a basic harvest of the MediaWiki content. Code is located on GitHub