TL;DR, Whether you are an amateur or an expert coder, or if you are a current or interested user of the WikiEduDashboard or of the Education Extension,* please join us at a hackathon session at Wikimania on Wednesday, 15 July in Workplace 2 - Don Genaro at 1pm. [0]*
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Wikimedia Foundation developed Extension:EducationProgram. It did what we needed it to do at the time, which was to provide a tool that helps organize classes that want to edit Wikipedia articles for course credit. Since its release, the extension has been deployed to 18 Wikimedia projects: it's on 4 sister projects in 16 languages.
Recently, the Wiki Education Foundation [1], led by project manager Sage Ross - User:Sage (Wiki Ed), User:Ragesoss - developed a Ruby on Rails app called the WikiEduDashboard [2], which they will use beginning this fall instead of the EducationProgram extension, for the university courses that they support on English Wikipedia.
We believe it is possible to use their freely-licensed code to create a clone of this dashboard that can be used for non-Wiki Ed education program courses and other group editing activities on English Wikipedia and, ultimately, on other Wikimedia projects and in other languages.
We are asking for community support for this project since this is outside the scope of WMF's engineering team for this year. We see the need for a global dashboard tool and would love to have your help building it!
We're planning some exciting improvements to the Wiki Education Dashboard, see Phabricator [3] for the full list. * Full i18n, including right-to-left support. * Generalize the UI to work for any wiki project and not only university courses. * Integration with the Gather extension, to render lists of articles being written and reviewed. * Integration with Campaigns, to track group membership and statistics. * Improvements to the API to simplify some actions taken from the Dashboard. * Potentially using Wikidata as the backend for storing information about courses and editing projects.
We look forward to working together to build this powerful tool which will support more education and outreach programs in the movement!
Elitre (WMF), on behalf of the WMF's Education team, + Andrew Green, Adam Wight, Sage Ross.
[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T103623 [1] http://wikiedu.org/ [2] https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/education-program-dashboard/