On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Cyken Zeraux <cykenzeraux(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Nischay makes a good point with the disconnect between
education and
Mediawiki.
What I meant was: getting to know about GSoC and WMF is hard, compared to a
summer internship at a company which comes to campus. I think GSoC is a
good (in my case was better) alternative to interning at a corporate.
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.
I like this idea. This would actually help Wikimedia's mission of
generating more knowledge available to all and also add more editors (Profs
currently author lot of content on their self managed sites, which could be
instead be a wiki on this farm).
On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Nischay Nahata <nischayn22(a)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(a)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(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hey Yaron,
>
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)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/
| ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>
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