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