On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 8:22 AM, Riccardo Iaconelli riccardo@kde.org wrote:
We aim to provide a platform where learners and teachers can complete, refine and re-assemble lecture notes in order to create free, collaborative and accessible textbooks, tailored precisely to their needs.
[...]
We are different from Wikipedia and other WMF projects in several ways, and in a sense, complementary. Our focus is on creating complete textbooks (and not encyclopedic articles), drawing from a professor’s or a student’s own notes, either existing or that have to be written down.
How does it compare to Wikibooks? From the description it sounds very similar. Or Wikiversity?
Besides a good team for content development, we can count on a small but motivated team of developers, and we would like to improve communication with upstream (a.k.a. you ;-) ), because we found ourselves developing a few features which could probably be made available to the general public, with some generalization and polishing. ;-)
Is this a right place to start such a discussion?
Great! For general communication, this mailing list is probably as good a place as any.
We would like to help as much as we can, but we might need some mentoring in how to best approach MediaWiki development, as many of us are relatively new to OSS/Web development.
Have you seen https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub yet?
Other advice I can give you is that getting something into MediaWiki core itself can be daunting, but don't be too afraid to propose a patch adding it if it really belongs there (even if "it" is just the hook that you need or a new accessor on some existing class). It can be difficult to find the right person to review the code and standards can be high, and sometimes it'll turn out that the thing should be done in a completely different way than you originally thought, but you're likely to wind up with a better result than if you hack things up in an extension.