Hi all,

I would like to introduce to the Wikimedia community WikiToLearn, a FOSS project of which I am a participant and which is lately getting a lot of contributions and momentum.

It is a KDE project sponsored (among the others) by Wikimedia Italy and recently joined by institutions such as HEP Software Foundation (CERN, Fermilab, Princeton...) or Universities such as University of Pisa and Milano- Bicocca. These institutions are already populating the website with content.

We aim to provide a platform where learners and teachers can complete, refine and re-assemble lecture notes in order to create free, collaborative and accessible textbooks, tailored precisely to their needs.

Although the project is quite young (only a few months old), it is already growing in allure at an unexpected rate. Thanks to this we are now counting on nearly 40 developers, and growing (including content developers).

We are different from Wikipedia and other WMF projects in several ways, and in a sense, complementary. Our focus is on creating complete textbooks (and not encyclopedic articles), drawing from a professor’s or a student’s own notes, either existing or that have to be written down.

We also have a strong focus on offline use: all the content of WikiToLearn should be easily printable by any student for offline use and serious studying.

Besides a good team for content development, we can count on a small but motivated team of developers, and we would like to improve communication with upstream (a.k.a. you ;-) ), because we found ourselves developing a few features which could probably be made available to the general public, with some generalization and polishing. ;-)

Is this a right place to start such a discussion?

We would like to help as much as we can, but we might need some mentoring in how to best approach MediaWiki development, as many of us are relatively new to OSS/Web development.

Bye, -Riccardo