Nischay makes a good point with the disconnect between education and Mediawiki.
A contributing factor to this disconnect is that Mediawiki isn't at all convenient for educators to get up and running. Thats just the software stack. Add ontop of that knowing how to install good extensions, such as Visual Editor and the Math extension, and you end up with a pile of sysop work that most educators just can't spend the time on. Commercial wiki hosters aren't particularly profitable and don't offer these features, either.
I was working on a project that could resolve some of these problems, but Mediawiki is not made in a fashion that would make this maintainable between versions, and in the end would still require a decent amount of sysop work.
This would be outside of getting students to code, but if Wikimedia wants to help solve the disconnect, hosting a wiki farm that is pre-loaded with features educators want, and allowing them to easily create wiki's for free (with an .edu email), would certainly do it. Add ontop of that a documentation wiki that is a lot more focused on those features, and how to properly use them, and you've got a two in one punch.
On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Nischay Nahata nischayn22@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
My 2 cents.
I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of GSoC (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty.
Secondly, I agree with Yaron that projects should be proposed by mentors. So we need more time from mentors for sure. I was lucky to have mentors who had enough time to discuss the project with me and help me while executing it. On the other hand when I was working for WMF as a contract developer, WMF engineers didn't have enough time to review my code (not blaming them though).
Lastly, I will talk about sticking with a project or the community. Most of these college students will go for a full-time job and it can be difficult to contribute. If they are still not in the final college year you can have them as contract developers (as was in my case) and maybe full-time developers later on.
Regards, Nischay Nahata
On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Yaron Koren yaron@wikiworks.com wrote:
Hi Tony,
Well, I still think there might be easier ways of getting students to
stick
with Wikimedia/MediaWiki over the long term - one obvious idea is to pay students who had useful projects to maintain or complete those projects, post-GSoC - but nevertheless, if you're willing to put in the work to create a WMF outreach/mentorship program, I support you; I'm sure any
such
effort is better than nothing.
-Yaron
On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Tony Thomas 01tonythomas@gmail.com wrote:
Hey Yaron,
On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren yaron@wikiworks.com
wrote:
But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than
essentially
requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc.
Maybe
the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself - talking
to
MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among
potential
mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an administrator
and
not a potential student.
Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about
new
tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to
increase
the quality of students itself before they start working on the
project.
Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can make
it
easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering past contributions matter). More than that, this would be one good option
for
post-GSoC students to still stick with the community too - as they can either participate, or even be mentors again.
Yeah - we are trying to solve actually two problems here - (a) better community code review and codebase aware students before GSoC (b)
making
students stick back with Wikimedia after they complete their project.
Thanks, Tony Thomas https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas Home http://www.thomastony.me | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.
com/
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