answered
2010-08-17 12:56:44 -0500
Federico Poloni 85 ● 7 Sure. I'll describe you my use case first. I am part of the organizing committee for the Italian mathematical Olympiad --- hey guys, please go on reading and don't be put off by the m-word. :)
Each few months, we assemble a text for a competition, composed of 20 to 50 different problems. Each problem is defined by a short text (~two to ten lines) --- the solutions are not published in this phase.
Our collaborators submit proposals, tagging them to denote the problem field (algebra, geometry, et cetera), its difficulty, and the competition it's being proposed for. Other collaborators may comment on the proposal and up- or down-vote it.
For their convenience, they need to be able to print the problems, so that they can try to solve them without being in front of a computer. Each proposal may take time to analyze --- especially since they come without solution. :)
After this discussion, the responsible for the final text selects the questions to put in the competition, according to the votes and comments received, but also autonomously based on his/her judgment, and produces the "official" text of the competition (~2-4 pages of text). This last step doesn't need to be automated.
What we would need in the perfect application for our job is:
- a standard login system for our collaborators
- ability to submit proposals (short text snippets), and to later edit them for errors
- ability to enter mathematical notation <--- not a big issue, we can add it ourselves using jsMath.
- ability to comment, up- and down-vote proposals
- ability to search easily among the archived proposals, using also tags (e.g. tagged [unused] and [geometry], containing the text "Pythagoras")
- ability to print down the texts of a given subset of problems (e.g. all [unused] and [geometry] problems)
Currently AskBot satisfies all this bullets but the last one --- we'd just need to replace the word "question" with "proposal". Moreover, it has other interesting features like the ability to vote for comments, and a reputation system to let us know who are the most active collaborators.
So I asked if there is any possibility that the last bullet gets implemented.
I hope this was clear, feel free to ask for more details.
And thanks again for trying to help me and for reading all of this post. :)
