On Friday, November 27, 2015 09:07:39 AM Brad Jorsch wrote:
How does it compare to Wikibooks? From the description it sounds very similar. Or Wikiversity?
Wikibooks is mostly for "generic" books, while we aim at content with a didactical value. For this reason we don't want the restrictions on software offer imposed by WMF, and we allow support for things like numbered equations, or the ability to create a more compelling UX through new skins. Target users are universities (students and professors) and research labs.
Wikiversity, on the other hand, has never managed to gain enough momentum within the academical communities. As Ricordisamoa wrote, it is now restarting, but it's after we gathered interested people and material, and we're currently way more active than the local Wikiversity group.
I believe we're doing a better job at performing a (IMHO FUNDAMENTAL) bonding with unis and research labs, mostly thanks to the fact that we come from there. AFAICT from a few private chats that is also OK with Wikimedia, since that is no longer their main focus (which is now WikiData and Wikipedia). All the efforts I have seen on this direction (e.g. WikiEdu and WikiMed) have concentrated on Wikipedia.
We also give a strong focus on offline usage of the content, from the layout of the pages to the content type. We were born to address a very specific and personal need, and we ensured to create the most easy and efficient platform for serious studying.
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.
First thing that comes to mind: we introduced a <dmath> tag (short for displaystyle math) that allows centered, complex and numbered equations.
I have seen that a similar patch has been explicitly rejected by the Wikipedia community. How do you suggest we proceed?
Bye, -Riccardo