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
Improving the Programs & Events Dashboard user experience
We’ve been fortunate this summer to have Google Summer of Code intern Sejal Khatri working on a broad spectrum of improvements to the Dashboard user experience. Earlier this year, Sejal completed an Outreachy internship, during which she created the entire user profiles feature. This time, she’s got a more ambitious agenda: to improve the user experience … Continued
Enabling wiki edits from Programs & Events Dashboard
One of the most common requests I’ve heard from the Wikimedia program leaders who use Programs & Events Dashboard is to enable automatic edits, which is one of the core features of the Wiki Education Dashboard. The automatic edits — on-wiki program pages, and userpage and article talk templates that link to them — let … Continued
Exploring automatic suggestions
One of the projects I’m excited about is an experiment with providing automatic suggestions to student editors about how to get started with improving their assigned Wikipedia articles. We want the dashboard to highlight specific improvements that student editors can make to their assigned articles, such as adding additional sources, including an image. I’ve been … Continued