Hello there,
My name is Vincenzo Eduardo Padulano, I’m a student in physics at Milano-Bicocca University. All my life I’ve been curious about the universe, the unexplored and the unknown. Above all, my interest was in finding new ways of improving our species’ adaptive skills against what is yet to come, and there’s no better way than uniting our efforts against it. No wonder then, that when I was contacted by Riccardo Iaconelli in late September 2015, I swiftly join the project WikiToLearn.
Wikiwhat?
Briefly, WikiToLearn is a website that aims to create an online library where everybody in the world should be able to acquire every kind of knowledge, and help to improve the existing one. in fact, the motto of the project is “knowledge only grows when shared”: this means that not only everyone can learn from the content of the site, but furthermore everybody is crucial to its upgrading!
What I did for it
So that’s how it went: I had a collegue of mine who was already working inside the project and asked me to join them, I accepted the invitation and as soon as I got in contact with the rest of “the crew”, I felt like at home. You can’t imagine how good it can feel not only doing the things that you like, but with such enjoyable people like the ones inside this project!
My first steps were mainly taking some time to learn the structure of the website and the basics of LaTex, a simple way to write mathematical symbols and functions. In a couple days I was already at full speed, writing pages and pages of content, mainly mathematics, but still it was fun and I felt appreciated for my work.
How it surprised me
As time went by, I saw more and more people joining our team, I can’t keep the numbers but I can feel the difference between September and now! And with Riccardo going from town to town spreading the project and receiving contacts and affiliations from different organisations, it was really clear that this project was just gonna keep growing.
And so it was! In fact in less than two weeks we are going to be hosted by CERN and sponsored by KDE e.V., that kindly offered us the possibility to develop our project in an advanced enviroment where most of the staff will be able to work in close contact. This is truly a great opportunity that I couldn’t see coming, but that was more than appreciated!
Expectations
Indeed I ventured on a journey that both inspires and challenges me, an Unearthly one you might say. I invite everybody to do like me, at least to try it, to be aware of the power that we have as humans when we stick together and to do everything possible to achieve this power
Thanks again to KDE e.V., CERN, and University of Milano-Bicocca.