Dear Team,
Hope everyone is doing great.
TLDR: WikiToLearn[1] is a young but fast-growing project within the
Wikimedia movement, with the support of the academia, tackling education
needs with new tools. I am happy to set up a discussion with anyone
interested in education;
Building on the discussion held during the Wikimedia Summit, Berlin about
the strong need of tools for education, I would like to take this
opportunity to introduce WikiToLearn to the Wikimedia India community.
WikiToLearn is an open platform where students, researchers and key people
in the academia can create and refine notes and textbooks, tailored
precisely to their needs, and giving them the power to customize teaching
beyond traditional textbooks.
WikiToLearn was founded in September 2015, when a group of students from
the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy had the necessity to share their
notes to study for their exams. Many different universities and research
centers[2] from all around the world (CERN, Imperial College,
Milano-Bicocca, just to name a few...) have since decided to join. We
are a Wikimedia
User Group[3] and supported by Wikimedia Italy. We are also working with
other chapters and Wikimedia affiliates, such as Wikimedia CH and WikiMed.
Since the project is not hosted directly by WMF (on similarly resilient
infrastructure from GARR[4]) means we are not subject to restrictions on
the software and are open to customizing the platform for the best book
editing experience. For example, we integrate external elements in our
infrastructure, provide a solid PDF generation feature, and in general
offer a streamlined and compelling user experience for textbooks editing
and consumption.
We are also working to provide features which are very hard to integrate
into a standard MediaWiki, such as collaborative editing and many other
features needed for using a wiki platform in an educational environment,
releasing all improvements under open licenses.
We also have a strong focus on the offline usage of the content, from the
layout of the pages to the content type.
I would like to take this opportunity to connect with all the amazing
developers, editors, and translators. I would like to check the interest of
community members for such a project and discuss a future plan in India. In
particular, if there is interest, I would like to host a call where we can
figure out how to take things to the next level and create some action. In
spite of the young age of the project, WikiToLearn is a vibrant community
and I believe there are chances to have a great impact which would add to
the wider Wikimedia Foundation movement mission! :)
[1]:
https://www.wikitolearn.org
[2]:
https://meta.wikitolearn.org/Academic_institutions
[3]:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiToLearn_User_Group
[4]:
https://www.garr.it/it/ <http://www.garr.it/it/>
Thanks and Regards
<http://www.srijanagarwal.me/>
Srijan Agarwal <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Srijancse>
Core Developer at WikiToLearn <http://www.wikitolearn.org/>
Blog <http://www.srijanagarwal.me/> | Github <https://github.com/Srijancse>
| ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com/>