On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 8:22 AM, Riccardo Iaconelli <riccardo(a)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.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation