Wikipedia Day: a year in review
Every year on January 15, we celebrate Wikipedia’s birthday. It takes thousands all around the world to make Wikipedia the resource that it is; Wikipedia Day is a great time to recognize all that hard work and successful collaboration. It’s also a day to speak to the importance of freely available knowledge and to continue conversations about … Continued
Welcome, Wes!
I’m pleased to announced that Wes Reid has joined the Wiki Education team as a Software Developer. In his new role, he’ll be working with me to maintain the Wiki Education Dashboard — our open source web app built with React and Ruby on Rails that empowers thousands of instructors, librarians, and others across the globe to … Continued
New tool identifies Wikipedia articles ripe for improvement
Wiki Education’s technology team is consistently updating the Dashboard to run more smoothly and to better suit the needs of the thousands of people who utilize it. As part of our mission to improve its open source code in a sustainable way, we engage young developers in contributing their own improvements to the Dashboard. If … Continued
Announcing new features on the Dashboard Timeline
In our continual efforts to improve our core resources, we’ve incorporated feedback from program participants to make the Timeline feature of our Dashboard tool more effective. The Dashboard is used by all instructors and students in our Classroom Program. And since 2010, that has been more than 1,000 instructors and 43,000 students. That’s a lot of people … Continued
Welcome Urvashi and Pratyush, summer interns!
This month, we kicked off two summer development projects that I’m very excited about. Outreachy intern Urvashi Verma is improving the Dashboard’s support for viewing, evaluating and curating photo and multimedia contributions, and Google Summer of Code student Pratyush Singhal is building Article Finder, a tool for exploring topic areas on Wikipedia and picking relevant, … Continued
5 things you didn’t know the Dashboard can do
Winter and Spring terms are officially underway. We already have 3,500 students enrolled who are already learning about, and contributing to, Wikipedia. But as an instructor, how are you supposed to keep up with all that work? Especially if you are just learning about Wikipedia for the first time yourself. Luckily, the Wiki Education Dashboard is here … Continued
Welcome Outreachy intern Candela Jiménez Girón
Candela Jiménez Girón — maudite — is off to a running start with her Outreachy internship project. From December to March, Candela is working on improving the Dashboard for Art + Feminism 2018. She’s already made progress on several of the highest priority issues identified from the 2017 Art + Feminism campaign, including a better interface on Programs … Continued
Running a newbie-friendly free software project
Our main tech project, the Wiki Education Dashboard, is a free and open-source web application. Built with Ruby on Rails and React.js, it’s a codebase that started in late 2014 as an ‘agency’ project: we hired the firm WINTR to develop the software we needed. For its first year, it was almost exclusively built through … Continued
The Web As She Is Spoke
Over the last two years, it’s been my responsibility to build and maintain the Wiki Education Dashboard, a complex website that has become our primary tool for keeping track of hundreds of courses and thousands of students each term. It’s been an amazing journey so far — one I started with almost no experience in … Continued
So long and thanks for all the poutine!
This year’s Wikimania conference in Montréal was — for me — the most intense yet. I discovered many years ago — after showing up to a few New York City Wikipedia meetups — that Wikimedians are my tribe. We’re nerds; we’re weird; some of us just can’t resist arguing about copyright for hours. Our community … Continued