[WikiToLearn] WikiToLearn in A Coruña

Tue Oct 6 10:28:53 UTC 2015

On Tuesday, September 22, 2015 02:05:03 AM Santiago Saavedra wrote:
> Hi again!
> 
> I had some spare time the other day :-)
> Unfortunately, this week will be just the opposite :-(
> Sorry, I had this email in my backlog for too long, but I couldn't
> manage to send it before (as you see, I might as well be asleep).

Hi! No worries,
actually, it is me who has to apologise this time for such a late reply... I 
got sucked up in the WikiToLearn sprint (which went amazing! we fixed ALL of 
the outstanding bugs up to that point) and the paperwork required just 
after... so yeah: meh -.-

> But anyway, we'll remember to advertise wikitolearn on our first
> activity next Thursday ;)

How did it go? :-)
I personally did yesterday a presentation for the matricules of Physics/Maths 
and it went pretty damn good: 7 "I want to help!" e-mails in less than 24 
hours...

> Next comments go inline.
> 
> Riccardo Iaconelli <riccardo at kde.org> writes:
> >> We are beginning the new year, and we're a bit enthusiastic on the
> >> amount of engagement we got this year (compared to last year), however,
> >> we did not yet speak about WikiToLearn (it was wikifm, right? :).
> > 
> > ahahah, exactly, you got me ;-)
> 
> You never revealed what wikifm meant in the beginning ;)]

It stood for "Fisica" and "Matematica", but it really lost its meaning a few 
months after its invention... we changed now anyways. ;-)

> >> Alongside, we are planning on starting our usual activities for novel CS
> >> students, and we'll publicise the project, on time, so that they may
> >> start by themselves a project like that.
> > 
> > Amazing!
> > 
> > The best we've found in my uni is if you could find a couple of base
> > courses (or as many as you want, but get at least 5-10 people per
> > course), and organize a collaborative note-taking/textbook-writing
> > between the students, who are likely to do some parts of this job for
> > themselves anyways.
> I think you may be right about that. The problem there is organizing the
> writing, I'm not sure we have the ideal manpower for that.
> 
> I think the best we could do is find someone in the class already
> willing to do it, but we don't know anyone there yet (let's hope we can
> engage many in these first weeks).

I will try here with self-organization.... I'll make a group of 5/10 
volunteers and tell them to do a group writing and try to produce a workable 
result.

>From the organizer point of view this would require maybe a bi-weekly check 
that everything is going all right and eventually a contact with a professor 
who can check the notes at the end of the course.

For any serious work this needs to scale, but I think it's a path worth trying 
for the potential throughput and engagement it generates. Today's newbies can 
also become tomorrow's mentors, and take on responsability for following a new 
group in the next term...

Anyways, I'll keep you updated on how this goes here...

> > Enthusiast professors always come in handy for this, especially if
> > they are happy to later review what is being written and eventually
> > use it as course notes.
> 
> Right. Problem with that is here most professors already have their
> lecture notes, many of them hopefully in LaTeX, but I don't recall any
> of them having an explicit license, yet.

You'll be happy to know that during the sprint our dev team made an awesome 
converter TeX->WikiToLearn, which even expands macros and maths... so you can 
just mail me some LaTeX files once you get your hands on them, and they will 
be uploaded in an amazingly quick way. :-)

For the licence, my experience tells me to just ask :-) 99% of the professors 
are very happy to relicense their work under open terms. On the other hand, 
sometimes they are fearful of bad advertisement, but for this you have to tell 
them that their original revision will always be kept untouched and 
unmodifiable (aka the history tab of Mediawiki), and that we can always 
advertise the notes as preliminary, unchecked job, until they are happy with 
them.

> So, with that, the problem is two-fold, in one side, students are no
> longer taking so many notes, because professors already give us a quite
> comprehensive suite of what the subject goes about; and in the other
> side, professors are already used to their LaTeX scheme of doing stuff,
> so they may appear a bit reluctant to that. We'll talk about that in a
> later issue.

Since the converter has happened, they could continue with LaTeX, and go on 
the wiki for quick and easy fixes...
Different PDF export styles are also possible and something we are open to 
look into. :-)

> [...]
> > I added to CC also Baltasar, who showed much interest in the project
> > during Akademy...
> 
> There is a meeting going to happen within Librecon (a conference in
> Santiago de Compostela, which some of us at GPUL are going to attend)
> among the Universities' Free Software Departments (Oficinas de Software
> Libre in Spanish terms), which are figures that some universities here
> have to promote free software within them, and I think it may be a very
> good place to introduce the project to them.

Yes yes yes yes yes!!!
If you want promo material or a presentation or something or simply need help 
don't hesitate to ask!

> [...]
> > Otherwise we can use the wiki itself for self project management.
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion on that yet, I think we'll find the most
> organic way in time.

Yes, we will figure it out...

> [...] 
> It could be nice, but I don't think I will be able to handle any
> additional workload at all for the following three weeks (I mean, I
> might answer to emails), but I have a couple projects with soon-ish
> deadlines which I mustn't miss.

Sure, thing, there is no stress!
Fortunately Spanish is a common enough language that we can get the help of a 
few other translators... if you can contribute but only have limited time, it 
would be the most helpful that you took on a "management" hat: local presence 
is unbeatable... and somebody else can help translating.

> >> Oh, and what does the "Sin revisar" (not reviewed) thingy at the top
> >> mean on spanish pages that I created?
> > 
> > That's just FlaggedRevisions doing its job... :-)
> > It's an extension to be able to mark "stable" versions of pages,
> > e.g. for professors/expert contributors reviewing. While it makes
> > sense for some kind of non-too-changeable content, I am starting to
> > think of reconsidering it until we have a bootstrapped website. Feel
> > free to provide me with your input once you start to use the website.
> 
> Ok, that can be nice, but as you stated, maybe it's not so crucial while
> there is no content yet there. Can we just "hide" it without having to
> go through config scripts, from within the wiki itself? It seems it's
> possible through "Pages with review configurations" in special pages
> (http://es.wikitolearn.org/Especial:P%C3%A1ginasConfiguradas) but I
> don't know yet how does FlaggedRevisions work, so that it can be
> initially disabled here but later on enabled.

After your request i disabled it on the whole site for now... we can re-enable 
it later very simply when we make use of it. I can also probably simply 
disable it via CSS and re-enable it explicitly when needed, but let's see...

> > Anyways, I just gave you full power (administrator, bureaucrat, ...)
> > over the Spanish WikiToLearn. It also allows you to mark pages as
> > reviewed AND upgrade other users rights. Use it wisely :-)
> 
> Yay!
> Now I have to train others in the Path to the Force. Should, then, I
> inscribe professors to the Editor group, if they chose to collaborate?

Yes, precisely! And don't forget to keep the community (wikitolearn at kde.org) 
up to date about further progress on the Path to the Force. ;-)

> > I think it's really due to the fact that the spanish version is not
> > even really linked from the homepage, and was really mostly empty
> > until yesterday... now things will change: amazing job! :D
> 
> I hope my work allows the spanish wiki to get linked from the front page
> ;)

Definitely, we will have to add a "how to contribute" page also to Spanish and 
it's after that it's going to be officially opened!

> > All in all, very exciting news, I am really looking forward to this!!! :-)
> > You made my week!
> 
> I also hope we can set it up, but I'll have to find some assistance (I hope
> to find it).

As always, let me know if you need any help! Sorry again it took so long! :-)

Bye,
-Riccardo