Hi all, this is an email to ask for help and advice on improving the Wikimedia UK websiite. Speaking to RexX recently at an event, I was discussing some of the issues we are having with the UK website recently as a result of it not being updated much. Some other chapters have recently gone down the path of moving away from MediaWiki to make their sites more user friendly, but I don't think we want to do that and I feel sure that with a bit of effort we could make our MediaWiki site look a lot nicer.
If you look at the
Special:Version page on the WMUK site, you can see all the extensions that are installed currently. It appears we are lacking many that would be useful, and not being a huge MediaWiki person I wonder if anybody could lend a hand with helping to install some. In particular, we cannot display video on the site, because there is no Timed Media Handler extension. We probably also need Template Styles for reactive tables, and there's probably more that would be useful. I would really appreciate if anybody could offer help in installing these and/or advising what other extensions we should install.
The website really needs quite a lot of work, but one thing I would really like to be able to do is to automate scraping the image and lead paragraph off blog posts and having it go onto the WMUK main Wiki page. At the moment this needs to be done manually and this is quite annoying. The same goes for the events list on the main Wiki page, which constantly has to be updated and duplicated from the Events page. Again, if anybody knows how this could be achieved, we would be very grateful.
One idea I'd like to suggest for doing this is to have a WMUK one day workshop with anybody who is interested to meet up and work with us on improving the site. I would be happy to organise this and arrange it if people would like to attend help us improve the site. If you would be willing to willing to come to London for this kind of event, please let me know so I can get an idea of how many people might come and help out.
I hope that Wikimedia UK can also be here to support your Wikimedia work and projects, so please bear in mind that there are always small grants available for expenses to cover members' projects, so please let us know what interesting things you have been doing and if there is any way we can support you.
All the best,
John Lubbock
Communications Coordinator
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 203 372 0767
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