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