WikiToLearn status

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

Hi Christoph,

You pinged us yesterday afternoon, please consider daily jobs and life
outside KDE, and if possible wait at least a couple of days before assuming
the project is dead.

The project is still active indeed, even if clearly not as explosively
growing as in 2016-2017. To this, the mailing list has never been
particularly active at any point in time.

Much of the development ended up to produce the 2.0 version, which, after a
strong start, is now progressing slowly but steadily (there were even GSoC
students helping us in both 2019 and 2020). We expect 2.0 to be the real
changemaker that will allow growth at a better scale as it will allow us to
provide the user experience we need to provide, but it is a rewrite and
currently desperately needs the help of frontend developers. We stopped any
MediaWiki development since we started working on this new version.

Development is of course not all there is to it. Besides the usual
maintainance, for example, since a few months we are working with GCompris
to help school teachers collaborate on the content for new learning units.
That work is happening on the English wiki, and should be seeable in the
recent history.

We also received some massive donations of content and we are working with
partners, in particular Wikimedia chapters, to import them as best and fast
as we can. Some of these content will require additional software, so it's
unfortunately not straightforward.

Spam is unfortunately quite overwhelming and, while we constantly add
mitigations (such as blacklisting external domains to curb spam), it is a
very hard problem. Spammers get smarter and smarter every day, and we run
out of possible mitigations so far, also due to Wikimedia limitations.
We'll keep blacklisting domains but we are aware it won't catch all
spammers, at least on a website with a rating as good as ours.

Community moderation is a thing but we are talking of more than 500
messages a day, and it would not scale. The 2.0 version, with its custom
API, will add additional layers of protection

Said all this, most importantly, our mission is to liberate content and
have it used by students, and this is the metric on which we judge
ourselves and our achievements. Luckily, it is also the best indicator: we
break usage records monthly and are the #1 link on Google for many
scientific queries. We hope to extend this reach to many more subjects in
the future.

If you have ideas or some time to help us with the current moderation or to
finalize the 2.0 version of course we'd be happy to hear from you or anyone
else.

Thank you,

Riccardo

Il dom 14 feb 2021, 15:19 Christoph Cullmann <christoph at cullmann.io> ha
scritto:

> Hi,
>
> during some reviewing of what we link from e.g. kde.org and Co. I
> stumbled
> over the current state of the WikiToLearn wikis.
>
> It seems most of the recent changes (of at least the last 30 days)
> are spam ( see links in
> https://invent.kde.org/websites/kde-org/-/issues/9 ).
>
> The development list seems to be vacant since 2018 (wikitolearn at kde.org)
> and same for the git repositories, more or less, if I don't misread the
> status on invent.kde.org.
>
> I pinged info at wikitolearn.org (as mentioned on their websites), so far
> no response.
>
> Is this project still alive?
>
> Some feedback e.g. here
>
> https://invent.kde.org/websites/kde-org/-/issues/9
>
> would be great.
>
> Perhaps this is just some temporary glitch in wiki moderation.
> I didn't revisit the longer history there.
>
> Greetings
> Christoph
>
> --
> Ignorance is bliss...
> https://cullmann.io | https://kate-editor.org
>
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