Wikimedia CH/Call for projects 2017/WikiToLearn
Legal name of organization or individual requesting this grant: Riccardo Iaconelli / KDE e.V. (non profit organization)
Contact username: User:Ruphy
Project name: WikiToLearn
Please provide a detailed description of your project:
WikiToLearn wants to create free collaborative and readily accessible textbooks. Our philosophy can be summarised as "Knowledge only grows if shared". On this platform, teaching and studying merges into the cooperative writing and revision of notes and textbooks, which can then be organized and reassembled, according to each user's needs. A number of contributors come from a large network of academic institutions.
We would like to develop this platform further and extend our reach to other institutions. In particular, we would like to request funding for a series of actions:
- Help developing a Swiss community, engaging Universities and research centers into producing more free and open content
- Finalizing the extension to equip Mediawiki with an offline editor (we already had a GSoC project on this, so we would need to finish it off)
- Finalizing the extension to equip Mediawiki with an collaborative editor (current development status: https://sagarhani.wordpress.com/2016/07/31/one-last-step-for-completion-of-google-summer-of-code-kde-wikitolearn/)
Please provide a detailed budget for your request:
- 5000 CHF for expenses related to event organization (travel, accomodation, print material...)
- 250hrs * 25 CHF/hr = 6250 CHF to finish the offline editor extension ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OfflineExtension )
- 350hrs * 25 CHF/hr = 8750 CHF to finish the collaborative editor
All extensions will be usable by all MediaWiki installations
Please explain what influence your activity will have on Wikimedia Projects:
(Quantitative: number of new pictures uploaded to commons, number of active and new editors involved, number of new articles created & Qualitative: strengthen the community of XXX etc)
We have a user group to upload stable versions of the textbooks to commons and integrate them in other Wikimedia projects https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiToLearn_User_Group We also share all of our extensions contributing, where applicable, patches to Mediawiki. Some of our extensions are: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiRating https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CollaborativeEditor or https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LatexCompleter We want to involve at least 3 swiss universities and have at least 20 free books created on different topics by July 2017. These books will be reviewed and uploaded to Commons.
How does your project fulfil WMCH's focus on GLAM, Education and Community programs?
WikiToLearn is made by a community of students and academics to provide free and better textbooks for the world. We aim to bridge the gap between secondary school, university and research, providing viable free alternative manuals that can be assembled according to the user's needs.
Provide the provisional target start date and completion date:
We would start working on the code by middle/late October, and organize events, with the support of the local community, before the beginning of the academic spring semester 2017 (so January/February). We would complete the project by July 2017.