Blogs from WikiToLearn

Bells and whistles from the WikiToLearn Community

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 24-Badges and books)

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Books, badges and new functionalities are coming!

Hey WikiToLearn-ers! It has been a while, but now “What’s going on?” is back.

This last period was really difficult for all of us but we never forgot of WikiToLearn. In spite of personal commitments and exams, the members of our community kept working day after day and now we see the results!

Electromagnetism is now ready!

In the first episode of “Meet the authors” we have come to know Dan, a long term contributor of ours. It is now a pleasure to announce that his book about electromagnetism is ready! Dan is one of the most active editors in our community and on our website he wrote several books on the italian portal: analysis, physics I, mechanics and electromagnetism! Kudos Daniele for your strong dedication to the project and for your contributions!

We have badges!

The tech team never stops, the platform is always at his best and our sysadmins work hard to provide you great services. When we had problems we were able to solve them very quickly and to get back on our feet! In this period

our devs worked on a long-term requested feature for our website: badges! Yeah, now WikiToLearn has badges! Since our project was born we were asked a way to certify an imported or reviewed book and to give its author/reviewer the proper merit. We are very happy to announce that this feature is now ready! When you donate a book to be imported, a proper tag will be associated to it on the website.

Professors always asked us a tag to certify their books authority. To accommodate this request now we have the “Reviewed” tag. Are you the author of a specific book and you would like it to be certified? Now with WikiToLearn you can! One step further to guarantee high-quality content and to monitor revisions on our dynamical textbooks!

Let’s celebrate!

We never forget where we belong: that’s why we remind you that during this week Akademy2017 is taking place in Almeria! Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community. WikiToLearn was born under the KDE umbrella and still today we fell part of the KDE family. This year WikiToLearn is represented at Akademy by Vasudha, a GSoC student of ours working on Ruqola. Today we remember Akademy with extreme pleasure: two years ago, during Akademy2015 our project was officially born!

Since the first official announcement to the public, so much happened. We can consider ourselves satisfied for the hard work we did and for the initial outreach we had. People feedbacks pushed us to work better and better to improve functionalities and to satisfy users’ needs. In this period we had the occasion to spread the word about WikiToLearn and we could obtain substantial involvement in our projects. We are extremely grateful to all the members of our community for events organized, books donated for importation, reviews and creation of new material on the platform.

For us now it’s time to work even harder. During these two years we came up to realize what we were doing properly and what has to be modified. In the next few months we are working on communication and style improvements to enlarge our community.

Content creation and usability are the two main issues we are facing right now.  Any kind of user should be aware of what the platform offers and should be encouraged to write on it. WikiToLearn collects dynamical textbooks and in the incoming future this innovative feature of our product has to become our strength point!

 

We are working for you, WikiToLearn-ers! Stay tuned, spread the word, join.wikitolearn.org and start sharing your knowledge in a completely innovative way!

 

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 13-Akademy Day2)

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WTLGoinOn

Day2 is about to end here at Akademy. The wrap up bof has just finished. Everyone is leaving the university or coming back to their pc to end the day with little more work.  WikiToLearn had to bof this morning, when the work started. First of all, Jayaditya had a bof on his desktop client, developed for the GSoC project. What he has done so far is really amazing! Future plans to improve the skin (eg. using Kirigami) and the client features are way more than promising. After his bof, the WikiToLearn team had a more general bof. We discussed about the global trend of our work and the daily activity was organized.

Crisbal and Rigolo had a nice discussion with Ken (KDE VDG) trying to come up with new ideas and suggestions for the new skin. The development of such a delicate aspect for our site requires patience and lot of efforts, but what you are going to see will be simply great! “The best WikiToLearn yet”, as someone would say 😀

Tunale and Valsdav spent their day with their best friends: regex and scripts. Course editor development is not effortless and they’re putting into play their best, only for you. WikiToLearn is going to be at its best version soon, especially for what concerns content. Forget WikiText, you are going to create a course even blind-folded soon!  English and Italian portal have been completely re-organized in a more precise way, with a clearer structure. Content re-organization was tough but scripts and lot of hand work allowed us to complete it today!

When at the end of the day you are satisfied of what you’ve done, happy for the result of your work and for the time you spent with fantastic people you can be sure that your day was amazing. This is just the beginning guys, lot of work still has to be done but something great presents at the horizon. Keep pushing and let’s rock!

groupphoto

 

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 11-QtCon Day3)

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WTLGoinOn

Like all good things, QtCon has come to an end. It has been an amazing summit. We shared our ideas, met new people interested in our project and  worked on lot of new features for our site.

Lot of people want us to go to their countries to talk about WikiToLearn, are willing to participate and contribute with us to the diffusion of free knowledge all around the world. Our developers are coding, coding and coding for you. We are preparing a huge event in Amrita University (India) to introduce people to WikiToLearn and to create new local communities.

Words can not express what do you feel at an event like QtCon, but now it’s over and real work begins. Contents on our site are growing faster and faster thanks to our importing team. You’re going to love the new course editor! Maybe we are stressing Tunale a little bit more… but he loves you and he keeps coding to provide you the easiest way to write your notes on our site 🙂

QtCon is over: how was it? Qt 😀

Now it’s time to move forward to Akademy, where the KDE family will be reunited at the Technical University!

We are extremely thankful to BCC staff for this fantastic event, to Qt for this amazing conference and to all the people we met for the coolest moments of these last three days!

finalconference

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 10-QtCon Day2)

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WTLGoinOn

Day2 blog post is one day late but, you know, you have to wait for good things!

QtCon-Day2 was amazing! It’s great to see people from other communities that share your same interests and have to face your same problems. Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has an education program and one of its managers had a talk explaining all the challenges they had to struggle with. It’s surprising to find out that we share lot of ideas and lot of critical issues. QtCon is the ideal place to hear new stories, to share your and to collaborate for the creation of new ideas.

 

What about your WikiToLearn team? They rock! Tunale is coding like there’s no tomorrow to release course editor: the easiest way to write on WikiToLearn is not that far! Pipsin is importing one book after the other: be ready for more than 1000 chapters on the Italian portal by the end of the week. Crisbal and Rigolo are working hard for the new homepage – I had a preview and I can assure that you’re going to love it! Valsdav and his thinkpad are working together to automatize most of the work for the communication plan. Ruphy and Mbona are spreading the word about WikiToLearn: watch out, a local hive may be created in your own city!

Great things are going on, great news are coming! As someone would say, we are working hard to provide the best WikiToLearn yet 🙂

Stay tuned, #wtlatAkademy is getting real!

 

FSFE had its birthday party yesterday night and it was amazing, but this is another story (and I don’t want you to be too envying lol) 😀