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Subtopic discussion

From a practical point of view 'World, American, European, Asian History, etc maybe later more individual countries with many entries like UK, Germany' - this would certainly help someone find something. Perhaps when a country has something like 25 courses it could get its own subforum? Maybe a separate subforum for the ancient world - anything up to the Romans perhaps. Would it be practical for a course to have a link in both temporal and regional subforums? So Medieval French Kings could be both in Europe and Medieval subforums. I have no idea what is feasable. But to much splitting up would be overkill.

''Topics with similar course structures (Timeline courses; Historic people courses including all the popular "Monarch", President, etc courses (in the format "years in office" --> name); "Quiz" courses that give a description instead of a date (like Greek gods); Private courses that ignore the structure of the wiki (initally, we could move most courses into this category as a kind of pool until appropriate for the wiki), and similar categories'' Maybe later if it turns out that there needs to be more than one type of conventions with different ways of uploading the info for the different types of courses.

''For the present mix of courses, my favourite would be the Timeline/People/Quiz/Pool subdivision, hopefully with better keywords. And a more detailed subdivision in the future if necessary''. My feeling is that users would be more likely to want to look for the region or of the course historical period than the forma, ie Timeline/People/Quiz/Pool would not help someone find something on medieval French kings.

I will start a thread in the main general forum with a link to this thread so maybe we can get some more opinions

Just to clarify what I wrote (it lookes a bit unclear) If history becomes one topic , maybe subtopics could be North american History, European history World/Other History and Ancient History. There is quite a lot of content for UK history too, so if that seems too much maybe it could have its own subtopic too, plus any other regions countries or topics that seem to be popular. Other logical ways would work too

We also need to consider direction of testing , ie both way testing , or just a to b, or b to a .(Does that make sense?!)

You convinced me that regional subtopics are better than course type subdivisions. And the direction of testing issue is thoroughly discussed in the conventions thread.

Apart from that, i had a (quick and incomplete) review of the "world history" and "american history" topics. Both contain not many courses and very few are useful for the public. Should be easy to move these in (the new subtopics of) history. To summarize, i write down the list of subtopics for the current courses:

Ancient History (the only temporal category) World History (courses that cover events on more than one continent) Other (Additionally to World History, could also be the pool of courses which do not comply with conventions) North American History (not sure if necessary, see below) European History Asian History Latin American History (better than South American History i think) African History (will people create content??)

I am not sure if there are any Latin American courses and probably there is no African course, but we would encourage people to create courses in the right category from the beginning. No idea how historians categorize Oceanic history. If i wanted to create a course about Australian Prime ministers, i would probably complain. On the other hand, this course might be the only one in "Australian history" for a long time...

And individual countries (based on the current courses and guessed user numbers in this order). American history (instead of North American History?? I have no idea what will be better...) British history German history (there are a number of German history courses created by non-Germans) French history (although many French won't like an English site) Chinese history (because Memrise has many Mandarin learners) Canadian history (there is maybe only one course about prime ministers at the moment, but together with Latin American history, North American history would be obsolete.)vi

I find it hard to decide which categories we need in the beginning, but obviously we can always create more subtopics when there is demand.

And do you have any idea how we actually move the courses around? I doubt that Ben will give us the rights to move courses (we possibly could become moderators, but i think they can't move content either, just join double content).

So in practice, we probably have to make an exact list of subtopic and course movements and send an email to Ben. The best solution is probably, to first move everything in "other" and distribute the (few) courses that really have a decent format. Later, anyone can ask to move a course from "other" to a certain topic (if the format has improved) and new courses will hopefully be created in the right topics.

Not a bad idea to have initially empty subdivisions to encourage content. We could do with input from New world learners how to divide the Americas. My guess is that Latin America vs North America . But are Jamaica and Guyana strictly speaking Latin American?

Oceanea/Australasia perhaps?

World + Other could be a nice getout - and your geological might fit there as it is maybe too ancient for ancient history!

I think the KISS principle should apply at first (Keep It Sweet nd Simple). Oceanea/Australasia perhaps?

KISS +1

My favourite is also to start with Latin and North America until the new world guys come up with a better solution. And Australia uses World or Other for their Prime ministers until the down under guys come up with a better solution.

+1 also :-)

Great, we almost decided on the topics. All that is missing is some feedback from other people and the compilation of courses that go into each topic (shouldn't be too time consuming as there are not so many really useful courses).

To make a start (Copy and Paste template): World History http://www.memrise.com/set/10038501/geologic-time-scale-jurassic-and-co/ (Geological Timescale) http://www.memrise.com/set/10021342/important-dates-2/ (World Timeline)

To give the others a fair chance, we could do the list when i am back from my holidays in two weeks or so.

Ok, thats good . I asked Ben to drop by and give his opinion on what is possible and desirable, and messaged a few creators of courses.

This in reference to the original post - a course on greek gods should be in it's own wiki subject - Mythology.

Maybe I'm being obtuse - but I always imagined the history topic to be like this - a singular event (birth, signing of a treaty, - date ) a series of connected event - like a war or regime - a range. When a quiz asks for definitions, then it is not technically a history topic because it needs date and description of event. e.g. major war that occurred between 1939 and 1945. answer = WWII.

Wouldn't you use common standards such as this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_periods

If divided regionally - wouldn't it need to be further subdivided - i.e. someone may only want to learn about the industrial age in England.

Wouldn't geological events go under Natural Sciences - as in Museum of Natural History in NYC?

With a stricter definition of history, yes, the Greek Gods topic doesnt belong . But they did populate peoples minds in the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries so they give insight into that period. I will let Azrael justify why he put his list here when he is back from holiday With geological periods - they are certainly in time ,therefore historical, but would seem to fit better in a geology section I learned about them in Geography at school. I think I would accept the broader definiton of History - ie if the compiler feels it is history, then I would probably accept that. But hopefully one or more professional historians will give some input here !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... Useful reference list, thanks

'If divided regionally - wouldn't it need to be further subdivided - i.e. someone may only want to learn about the industrial age in England.' Yes - though it would depend on if Memrise can do multi-layered organization. It might be an issue for the future, though

This is an excellent discussion, apologies for coming to it so late.

This really does highlight the rigidity from which the current structure suffers: a list can only exist in one "topic" which is also a wiki of all the items that may be used in courses in that wiki. This has got a lot of implications for where it is best to put certain courses so that people will be able to find them, and also so that they will draw from the right pool of information; as you have been discussing.

We have also been discussing how to deal with this, and we are looking at changing the whole way that you navigate to find particular courses: rather than having to know the topic (or wiki) that a course draws from in order to find it, we are going to have a "browse" page where you can search for any course by tags: so you could filter by "history", for example, and then filter again by "Greek" to get "greek history".

We are also designing tools to let you build courses that are made up of multiple wordsets which can be learned one after the other. These sets within one course can be from different topics. So, for example, you could make a "Spanish History" course that contained two wordsets, one for learning dates or major events (which might actually be using items from the "history" wiki), and another on "Great Spanish Painters" that may draw items from the art history course.

This would mean that the topic that a wordset uses words from would cease to be important as a feature of navigation: really the important thing about a topic is that it is full of words and definitions that lots of people can work on and improve the content of. It is more important to people who are creating courses rather than those who are learning. Learners just want to be able to find the things that they want to learn.

I hope that that makes some sense to you - we are working hard on this right now, and as you can imagine, it is going to mean quite a bit of re-working of the navigation in order to make sure that everything works smoothly, but it will make everything a great deal more intuitive once it is done.

Just to make this a bit clearer, as I realise that I am mixing terminology: at the moment we call plain lists of facts "courses" - in the future we are going to be calling these "wordlists", and "courses" will be used to describe sets of wordlists that are grouped together in a single place. These "courses" will also have the option to include videos, slideshows and other explanatory tools that might help to give more context or depth of understanding to the learning experience.

So perhaps the best two things would be:

1. to put together a list of the topics that you need, based on the testing requirements - ie test from "date" to "event" or vice versa, also the requirements for the names of the fields "date" or "birth date" or "date of death" etc. Then I can move all the current lists into the right topics for you so that they are tested in the right way.

2. put together lists of the wordlists that should go into different courses. This doesn't need to be all lists, but for ones that would go well together. We could just leave each wordlists as a course on its own. But it would be really great if we could put together some slightly richer courses that led you through learning a few different aspects of the same subject.

Does that make sense? I possibly haven't explained it very clearly, so please et me know if you have any questions!

Best wishes

Ben

'...we are going to have a "browse" page where you can search for any course by tags: so you could filter by "history", for example, and then filter again by "Greek" to get "greek history"'

Excellent!

....'for example, you could make a "Spanish History" course that contained two wordsets, one for learning dates or major events (which might actually be using items from the "history" wiki), and another on "Great Spanish Painters" that may draw items from the art history course.'

Good I like that idea to link history and the arts. In 'French Kings' I added some relevent early music to mems and a little artwork to help bring historical periods to life

.... 'the option to include videos, slideshows and other explanatory tools that might help to give more context or depth of understanding '

In History could the audio still be kept?.... it might be useful to give pronunciation (a Spanish speaker asked for English pronunciations of Roman Emperors) or a an extra level of clarifying info, or jsut a sound effect

...' list of the topics that you need, based on the testing requirements - ie test from "date" to "event" or vice versa, also the requirements for the names of the fields "date" or "birth date" or "date of death" etc.'

Best wait for Azrael's response (next week I think as he is away). He is the ideas man !

Presumably most things we decide now could be adjusted later after testing them out on new lists

I guess anything not clear now soon will become clear in time, or through further discussion

Thanks for all the insights and suggestions, Ben, and thanks for the flowers, tonyyy (and also discussing all these things mostly with me). I will probably need some time to read and think about everything before i contribute again to the discussion.

This discussion is really getting interesting.

Obviously, tonyyy and me tried to organize the existing courses in a practical way with the current (rigid) structure of memrise in mind. The regional categories are kind of obsolete now that Ben revealed the new features which will make it possible to realize an extremely flexible multi-layered organization of courses. And we can realize all the suggestions of jenniferhunter especially all categories of time and region from wikipedia or established history sources. I honestly didn't know oft he wikipedia-list and i would have called the distinction way to detailed for the current amount of courses before knowing of he changes. And funny enough we need know a division of topics in a way that i suggested in the opening post, that we discarded for practical reasons and that also jenniferhunter intuitively favoured (history topic only for date/event format).

Ben, i think you explained pretty well the new terms "wordlist" and "course" as well as the distinction between the wikis with a similar word structure for creators ("topics" at the moment) and a flexible directory of courses for the learners, organized by keywords assigned to courses (and words?).

Ben's second suggestion can only be realized when the new features are implemented, as far as i can see. But as soon as this is the case, we (the active curators) should be able to add some keywords to popular courses rather quickly and create a few prototype collections from different wordlist.

Since languages are still more important for memrise than non-language content (i suppose), you probably have also combinations of vocabulary tests and grammar questions in mind, which could even be merged with flashcards from famous people or landmarks or history giving the course creators an enormous flexibility and allowing truly innovative online learning. For instance, an intermediate Spanish course could start with a text or video about the Golden Age of Spain (using certain past tense verbs), motivate the learner by showing him some maps/pictures and feeding him the flashcards of some art/people/events/buildings of the time, continue with the flashcards of difficult words and finally ask some grammar question (from a question-answer Spanish grammar wiki) and test past tense conjugations (from the Spanish conjugation wiki). Just trying to think of a full exploitation of the new system...

In order to tackle Ben's first suggestion, to create appropriate extra wikis and divide existing courses among these, we are going to need some more information and decisions from you and your team, Ben. Maybe not all issues are necessary for the division, but all issues are important for future non-lingual courses, in particular for consistency conventions we are discussing about in the other thread.

1. Do you plan to implement a feature for choosing the learning direction of typing test?

For instance, do we need a wiki "Date -> Event" AND a wiki "Event (with long description) -> Date" or just one? Actually, i kind of expect you to implement such a feature since it would allow all language wikis to distinguish (without any effort) between learners who plan to actively use a language and learners who prefer the easy direction (foreign -> native) for passive reading/understanding.

On one hand, an eventdate format enforces the event descriptions to be in a short "typable" way. On the other hand, one could add the words with long descriptions testing for the date in the question-answer history section.

2. How flexible are you with the learnable fields for the non-language topics? In particular, will you increase the number of learnable fields?

For instance, i try to think of decent format for famous people: Ideally, you want learnable fields for picture, name, profession, country of origin, lifetime (or date of birth/death), „time in office“ for rulers/politicians, and maybe a general (learnable) „description“ field. Or maybe more, e.g. the numbering of the American Presidents. Course creators could set the fields which are tested in a certain course (and maybe even those which are shown as extra-info) and maybe every learner could modify this individually. In fact, all fields except picture could be used by the multiple choice engine looking for coincidences or similarities to create more difficult and interesting multiple choice tests. Mems would be kept separately for each learnable field (like main mems and pronunciation mems at the moment).

Alternatively, sticking with the current structure, you could create several people topics, one testing „picture->name“ and "picture->description" and maybe "name->description" (more less like „famous people“ at the moment), one testing „time in office or lifetime -> name“ which would also allow to include pictures in the name field like it is done for instance for the American presidents course (number 5…) http://www.memrise.com/item/1839837/george-washington-imghttpstaticmemrisecomuploadsme/?set=american-presidents-5 More people categories are needed when people like to learn more extra info about people. The picture and name of a person will thus be contained in several topics, mems are spread over several flashcards of one person, so i guess the solution with many learnable fields corresponds much more with the memrise philosophy.

At the moment, i actually like the flexibility with a general description field and i don’t mind putting questions in a date or country field, but in the long run, this will certainly lead to consistency issues. A surprisingly entertaining and useful quiz-like course trying to exploit all current possibilities is http://www.memrise.com/item/2205982/highest-mountain-on-earth-imghttpstaticmemrisecomu/?set=seven-summits-with-pictures

3. Where do you plan to go with the „part“ field? Obviously, this field is very important at the moment since it creates categories for the multiple choice engine and gives clues/avoids confusion/creates context when learning multiple courses or when learning after a while of absence or when learning inhomogeneous courses. It could stay as it is with a better name („category“ ??), maybe an individual name for each wiki. Actually, the field would be obsolete in the scenario for people under 2. if the multiple choice engine uses all fields and the course creator could pick one or two of the learnable fields which are displayed as a clue before typing, formatted exactly like the "part of speech" is formatted now.

4. How much splitting of topics do you want? Do you rather want to put words in an existing wiki that doesn’t fit exactly content-wise but offers good fields or create a new topic/wiki for everything?

For instance, the geological time scales and the monarchruling period courses fit into the dateevent scheme, but one could also create a geology wiki with date-event and a people topic with nametime in office as mentioned above. But then you need for each subject another wiki with question-answer and maybe one with multiple choice only and the geology ones will contain maybe 100 words after 5 years. A mythology (question-answer) wiki for Greed gods would probably be justified since it could contain mythology from all cultures, but with the new browsing system, one could put the words as well in the history question-answer wiki just because it doesn't really matter. Of course, there is no need to decide this now and forever, new wikis can be created and filled with some oft he existing content whenever there is enough interest, but it would be easier to suggest a decent number of categories for us when we would know a general point of view of memrise. It comes down a little bit to the question: How much do you expect memrise to grow and how important are the non-language topics for you?

5. How do you plan to make word creators choose the right wiki? At the moment, there is some confusion due to the general names of the topics which are catchy, but don’t tell you anything about the testing format of the words. In the short run, topic names should probably be a little bit longer like historic events, history quiz or famous people by name, famous people by lifetime, country capitals (instead of world geography) and so on. Ideally there should be a subtitle or description included somewhere that tells you exactly which words are supposed to go in the wiki in question and which fields are tested in which direction.

6. Do you plan to implement non-lingual topics for different languages? It's maybe not so important at the moment, but tonyyy and me would be interesting to hear your opinion on the idea that courses on French history for English natives should contain French alternatives definitions or even French main definitions? (There's a separate thread on this in the history forum)

7. Do you have any idea, when the current changes are available for users? I understand that you can't give exact dates, but some information like a month or rather a year would be interesting for the decision whether to spend time and energy to create conventions and more courses for the current system or rather wait for the new stuff which will require different conventions anyway.

As a basis for furthers discussions, i suggest some wikis with many learnable fields (which could also be called "databases" or "dictionaries") for the history related topics (and also geographical stuff while i am at it)

All wikis could contain a general description field for context-depending stuff, an audio telling you the name (and maybe even some of the secondary learning fields), maybe a secondary audio like an anthem/song/speech excerpt/recorded extra info.

Famous People, picture, name, local name, profession, date of birth/death, "time in office", country of origin, number in line (of presidents or a dynasty)

Historic events, picture (optional), event description, date/period, historic epoch, location (city, country, continent, global depending on context), involved countries/parties/people, type of event (currently "part") like "signing of treaty, war, founding of something, invention", etc), maybe a secondary type like "religious, military, economic, political, scientific", etc as suggested by jenniferhunter, but while i write this, i realize that that the second type can be usually derived from the keywords invention, war, treaty, etc).

History „quiz“, question, question in local language (e.g. French in French history context), answer, answer in local language, what else?

Artwork, picture, original name, name in English, artist, year of creation, artistic epoch, type of artwork (painting, sculpture, photograph, movie (?), etc)

Building (in the widest sense), picture, name, local name, location, period of construction, architect, Epoch, type of building, maybe association (like UN, XYZ-Bank, Catholic Church, etc), maybe interior picture, picture on city map

Country (including states,provinces,etc), picture on map, name, local name, capital, flag, coat of arms, population, area, year of creation/independence, etc pp

City, similar to country but e.g. country instead of capital

Natural Landmark, including rivers, mountains, lakes, waterfalls, islands (?), natural parks, etc. Not sure if separate wikis are needed since people may be interested in different minor fields like length, height, area, volume or more

geography quiz, similar to history quiz

other, picture, name, description 1, description 2, description 3 (for everything that doesn't fit in any of the existing wikis...)

Obviously, a flexible way of testing for course creators would make many existing topics obsolete, for instance, "flags", "world geography" (capitals), "map geography" would be special tests of the "country database".

Not sure if it is better to use the same database for all question-answer flashcards with topic as one of the "clue fields" or create several question-answer databases.

Maybe the flexible course creator or learner's choice of the fields tested could be extended to alternative definitions which could solve some issues in the language topics with synonyms or different opinions on ideal definitions.

Maybe (parts of) your answer should be a kind of public announcement, Ben.

Ok, i wrote more than planned, but i had a long train journey to think about this and as you may have noticed i find memrise quite fascinating at the moment...and please feel free to correct/improve any English issues especially the keyword suggestions, i am not native in English as mentioned and will not be offended.

Since languages are still more important for memrise than non-language content (i suppose), you probably have also combinations of vocabulary tests and grammar questions in mind, which could even be merged with flashcards from famous people or landmarks or history giving the course creators an enormous flexibility and allowing truly innovative online learning.....]

.... Excellent - would you post this in the main discussion forum with a link back to here?

All wikis could contain a general description field for context-depending stuff, an audio telling you the name (and maybe even some of the secondary learning fields), maybe a secondary audio like an anthem/song/speech excerpt/recorded extra info.

+1

I will wait for Ben to reply to the other points in your first post - maybe a good idea to send him this in a private message

Many of these ideas are relevent in other topics. Are there active curators in these topics (like Geography ) who might give feedback?

Ben probably gets an email anyway, but he probably gets many emails with new forum messages.

A good way to make Ben's answers known to many people would be the creation of an FAQ thread in the user-guide section including maybe some more questions that people ask all the time...

And there are a few curators in the geography topics (including myself..), but i am was planning to wait for the outcome of the history discussions and suggest something very similar afterwards for other topics. And obviously even curators rarely read the discussion thread of their topics.

A small feature suggestions (@Ben...) would be an optional mail notification for curators when there are new discussions in the main forum of their topic and also new discussions in words in their topics. Otherwise it's impossible for users to suggest alternative answers via the word discussion.

I just read some discussions in the Spanish forums about issues with deciding the flashcard formats of words that have multiple different meanings and/or multiple similar meanings and/or true synonyms. As far as i can tell, there is no clean solution with the current flashcard system. Nobody can learn a complete all meanings of word and you learn a lot of words that you will never see in action (and thus forget all the time). Usually you are interested in an individual flashcard containing only the meaning of a word that arises in your learning context, e.g. a book you are reading or a course you are attending.

A very powerful solution would be the separation of flashcards and dictionaries, in the same way as the dictionaries for events/art/countries i suggested. A language dictionary would have completely unambiguous entries like a traditional dictionary, that is for Spanish an entry for each Spanish word with all English meanings (separating different meanings by a short extra info and listing true synonyms for each meaning) and, similarly, an entry for each English word with all Spanish meanings. Compare http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/wall http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/pared

Now think of the proposed Spanish course including a text, some media, some non-lingual flashcards, some grammar flashcards, and the flashcards for difficult words in the text. To make this work, the course creator needs to be able to create flashcards from the dictionary entries of the words he needs by selecting the meaning that is needed in his text. Obviously, mems are separated by meaning and in a course, only the mems for the selected meanings are shown. Similarly, he can choose for the non-lingual flashcards, say some artworks, whether he makes easy "show painting-ask for painter" cards or more sophisticated ones like "show painting, painter, owning museum, year of painting-ask for name of painting" or whatever combination of the artwork dictionary fields he considers most appropriate for the context of the course. It would even be possible for the course creator to pick his favourite audio recording of a word and maybe decide which mem or extra info mem (possibly containing multiple medias) is preferred, i.e. shown first. Or maybe the last suggestion goes to far and makes the course creation to complicated.

I know that this is not easy to implement intuitively, but it sounds like an extremely flexible solution. For instance, the main memrise concepts that courses belong to the creator and can be indiviual compilations and words in the wiki belong to the public (including the {no-duplicate-policy) would be realised in a much more practical way}, because the dictionaries are obviously holy and only modified by curators (including patrols of suggestions) and the learning flashcards are now semi-automatically created for each course individually.

Another mayor improvement would be that English natives learning Spanish and Spanish natives learning English would be sharing one English-Spanish dictionary (or two if you want). Instantaneously, the site would be much more appealing for English learning Spanish natives with plenty of positive consequences for the Spanish learning English natives, e.g. the amount and quality of example sentences and audio entries should increase significantly for both sides. Not to mention possible interaction between the learners...

Nevertheless, i would be still very interested in your answers on the questions listed above, Ben.

Please ignore typos, i am tired of copying and reposting, e.g. the highlighting in bold fonts is lost. BTW, i find the highlighting necessary to make very long posts more readable in particular for people joining the discussion later...