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Wiki(1.0), what’s going on? (Part17)

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wtl1-0

WikiToLearn1.0 is moving its first steps, let’s find out how is it going!

Here we go! It is almost two weeks now since we released WikiToLearn1.0!

Since the release, we got a lot of feedback and support! We could accomplish this not only through our own promotion, but also, inter alia/amongst others, with the help of:

  1. Dot-Kde announcement;
  2.  An interview with Radio Popolare (Italian radio station);
  3.  baltolkien ‘s post on KDE-Blogs;
  4.  a presentation at Imperial College London;
  5.  Wikimedia CH, KDE and many contributors of ours shared the announcement post on their socials

We are very happy, that we could welcome new contributors and we hope our community will keep on growing, both in contribution and content.

Now, something special for you in this episode! We have decided to do an interview with Srijan Agarwal: he is a member of our community in Amrita University, Amritapuri, India, where he’s doing great promoting WikiToLearn! To spread the word about our community, he is organizing events (MediaWikiToLearn hack/edit-a-thon) and talks on WikiToLearn. We wanted to appreciate his efforts and therefore , we decided to put him into WikiToLearn’s  spotlight and  interviewed him.

Q: When (and how) did you become a member of the WikiToLearn community?
Ans: So, it all started after I made my first technical contribution to Mediawiki in early 2016. I was looking for a project to contribute to in Google Summer of Code that same year, and one of my mentors at Free Software club in our campus : FOSS@Amrita, Harish Navnit, asked me to check WikiToLearn. And there starts my journey with WikiToLearn. I applied for a project : Offline Extension for WikiEditor, and it got accepted. My GSoC mentors, Gianluca Rigoletti and Irene Cortinovis, were really helpful and guided me throughout the summer of 2016.

Q: You are part of the community for a while now. What do you like most?
A: I really like the motive behind the WikiToLearn project.. WikiToLearn focuses on a worldwide problem with students, that can be solved by sharing knowledge. Being a student myself, I’ve experienced and know the problems faced by students and I really like how WikiToLearn is helping solve these problems.

Q: You are doing a great work to talk about WikiToLearn in your country, can you tell us something more about it?
A: Sure. What I feel is that, Indian education system lacks creativity, collaborative thinking and a technology infrastructure. WikiToLearn is a platform, which certainly is the answer to these problems. Therefore, I’m promoting WikiToLearn in India in as many ways as I can. I have been giving talks on WikiToLearn at universities and conferences, eventually helping students and professors with contributing to WikiToLearn. I’m now working on making the next event a success, i.e, WikiToLearn India Conference, 2017.

Q: Are you happy with your WikiToLearn-experience so far?
A: Yes of course. WikiToLearn is like a second family for me. It has taught me that love for knowledge and learning can overcome all kinds of barriers, even geographical and cultural ones. Working with such amazing developers around the world has taught me so very much. I have grown so much technically and socially with my association with WikiToLearn. Overall, my experience has been startling.

Q: Why should other people join WikiToLearn?
A: Are you a student and want to have personalised textbooks for your courses? Are you a professor and want to make your teaching methodologies better?  Are you a programmer, and want to contribute to open source software? WikiToLearn is the right place for you, then. Join WikiToLearn and grow along with volunteers and academics around the world.

If you are more curious on who are our top contributors these two weeks after the release, want to know more about our statistics you should know that with the 1.0 release, Reports-WikiToLearn came out too. Here you can find these two weeks report!

Thats it for this episode,

Bye all! 🙂

 

 

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 15-It’s been a while)

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WTLGoinOn

 

Even if you’ve not heard from us for a while, doesn’t mean we disappeared! Here we go again with “Wiki, what’s going on?”.

So, what happened after Akademy? Quite a lot, since everything you’ve read in our previous posts was developed in details and the 1.0 release is now getting closer and closer.

Let’s have a step back: during Akademy we started working on the new skin, which is now almost complete and available in a beta version in production! Course Editor was one of our biggest efforts during our period in Berlin and now we are happy to announce that is alive in production. With these two features WikiToLearn is going to change, and you are going to love it! With more attention to UX and a easier editing environment we hope you to use WikiToLearn more and more: share your knowledge!

The site usability is improved also thanks to the creation of new guides, localized to every language portal, to allow anyone to be able to write on WikiToLearn.

In this period we also had the MediaWikiToLearn at Amrita University, Amritapuri Campus. Here we had the first Memorandum of Understanding signing between WikiToLearn and the Amrita University. Many students had the possibility to discover WikiToLearn and the way it works, hoping that they loved it and are willing to join our project. This event gave us the possibility to collect important feedbacks, extremely useful for the 1.0 release.

 

WikiToLearn 1.0 is going to be released soon, with lot of new (and cool) features. Beside course editor and the new skin, with the new release we are going to launch our new communication plan. “Wiki, what’s going on?” was thought as a series of blog posts to allow you to be updated on what happens in our community, but with the problem that it’s not really periodic and it based on a blog structure. With the new communication plan, anyone can be always updated thanks to the new “WikiToLearn Reports”: a bi-weekly official report of what’s going on in our community, with statistics of each project.

For sure there is something I’ve not told you about in the new WikiToLearn, but you are going to discover it by yourself (or thanks to the new report system, or with “Wiki, what’s going on?”). Stay tuned: WikiToLearn 1.0 has never been this close!