Comparison of GIFT and Wikiversity Microformats

What this is
This is a document that analyzes converting both ways between Moodle's GIFT picoformat and the Wikiversity Quiz.php microformat. The first thing to do in a conversion project between these two formats would be to do a feasibility study in order to get some idea of the difficulty of the task.

The concept of data loss here is based upon viewing the conversion as-is. "Data loss" doesn't mean that there is no conceivable way to save and convert this data. Rather this is relatively a "heuristic agnostic" exercise so it is simply identifying problems. For every bit of hypothetical data loss there would have to be additional code written, either by changing the functionality of one or both of the parsers (Wikiversity's and Moodle's) or by writing extra work-around code in the conversion code. Because of that a heuristic agnostic data loss study can give us an idea of how big this project might be in the short amount of time.

In addition to that it can later serve as a document to speed up algorithm creation as patterns for conversion can be identified, and problems areas are already laid out.

Perhaps most importantly of all this is Wikiversity, a website that aims to collect instructional content, and applying a "high documentation" policy to this project, and ANY Wikiversity project, is going to create more Wikiversity content that may have value to others, both editors and learners. It is my opinion that here more than anywhere, this is the best policy.

Please feel free to contribute to this document. It doesn't belong to me. It belongs to Wikiversity.

Conclusion
For the most part most question types, and features can be converted with no obvious difficulty. There are a few instances where a question may have to be broken up into several questions, or a questions may change the way it appears to the test-taker in a dramatic way without changing the function. Those instances may require special functions to accomplish.

Keep in mind having this information is only the first step in determining the scope of a conversion project, and hence its length, since the code available for extension has to be taken into consideration as well. As of yet there is no known document that takes any code in consideration. A complimentary document would compare a body of code of interest, such as Quiz.php, with this document to determine the true nature of a conversion project.