WikiToLearn

Last updated

WikiToLearn was a collaborative, international, free knowledge project, run entirely by volunteers, and dedicated to creating free and accessible textbooks for higher education. In December 2013, it joined the KDE Project through its incubation process with multiple sponsors like Wikimedia Italia.

Contents

WikiToLearn
FoundedJuly 24, 2015
FounderRiccardo Iaconelli
TypeCommunity, Education
Focus Open textbooks, Science
Parent organization
KDE
Website www.wikitolearn.org
Formerly called
WikiFM

History

WikiToLearn started as WikiFM in Milan by a group of science students from the University of Milan Bicocca on May 1, 2012. WikiFM was originally launched as a private wiki to exchange links, suggestions, and other information related to studying at the University of Milan Bicocca.

In May 2013 the website has been publicly announced using some money destined to student associations of the University of Milan Bicocca. [1] For this historical reason, while the project has an international aim, the bulk of the oldest content is in Italian.

In September 2013 WikiFM received the sponsorship of Wikimedia Italia. [2] In December 2013, WikiFM officially joined the KDE project, by entering, as first project, KDE's incubator program. [3] [4] It was later advertised by the KDE project as one of its most important success stories. [5]

From WikiFM to WikiToLearn

2015 has been the turning point for the project. The key event happened during KDE's annual conference, Akademy. In July 2015, Riccardo Iaconelli has given a speech on the WikiFM project [6] in order to submit it to the attention of the international community. On this occasion, the website has enriched to accommodate multiple languages, to embrace a larger number of people using their native language. Following the initial feedback, WikiFM was subsequently renamed to WikiToLearn. The project thus started to gather a more official attention from educational institutions. The first foundation interested in using WikiToLearn as a training/tutoring platform has been the High Energy Physics Software Foundation, [7] which experimentally tried its own section on the English website. [8] [9] Several professors from different institutions have subsequently started to collaborate on WikiToLearn, like CERN, HSF, [10] and Fermilab. [11] In September 2015, the University of Milano-Bicocca became the first institution to officially back the project, asking professors and students to populate the portal with educational content.

The project

WikiToLearn stated goal was to provide free textbooks to the world.

Content was written by both students, who ideally start to create textbooks while studying the subject in question, and professors, who provide thorough fact-checking and accuracy.

Given the technical nature of the topics, there was a complex review and rating system under review to try to measure the quality of the individual articles. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE</span> Free software community

KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of cross-platform applications such as Amarok, digiKam, and Krita that are designed to run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qt (software)</span> Object-oriented framework for software development

Qt is cross-platform application development framework for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikibooks</span> Free resource library of books

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kubuntu</span> Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, utilizing the KDE desktop environment

Kubuntu is an official flavor of the Ubuntu operating system that uses the KDE Plasma Desktop instead of the GNOME desktop environment. As part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu uses the same underlying systems. Kubuntu shares the same repositories as Ubuntu and is released regularly on the same schedule as Ubuntu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia movement</span> Group of global contributors to Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vietnamese Wikipedia</span> Vietnamese language Wikipedia

The Vietnamese Wikipedia is the Vietnamese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, publicly editable, online encyclopedia supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Like the rest of Wikipedia, its content is created and accessed using the MediaWiki wiki software.

An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux user group</span> Organization of computer users

A Linux User Group or Linux Users' Group (LUG) or GNU/Linux User Group (GLUG) is a private, generally non-profit or not-for-profit organization that provides support and/or education for Linux users, particularly for inexperienced users. The term commonly refers to local groups that meet in person but is also used to refer to online support groups that may have members spread over a very wide area and that do not organize, or are not dependent on, physical meetings. Many LUGs encompass FreeBSD and other free-software / open source Unix-based operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikiversity</span> Wikimedia wiki for learning materials

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia. It is available in many languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Wave</span> Software framework for real-time collaborative editing online

Google Wave, later known as Apache Wave, was a software framework for real-time collaborative online editing. Originally developed by Google and announced on May 28, 2009, it was renamed to Apache Wave when the project was adopted by the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LibreOffice</span> Free and open-source office software suite

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. It consists of programs for word processing; creating and editing spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, and drawings; working with databases; and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages. TDF does not provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprise-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Karlitschek</span>

Frank Karlitschek is a German open source software developer living in Stuttgart, Germany.

Celeste Lyn Paul is an expert in interface design and usability. She is a contributor to KDE.

WebPlatform.org was a community-edited documentation website spun off by W3C. It sought to create a vendor-neutral online reference of Web platform standards. The project was a collaboration among Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera Software, and W3C, who were called "stewards" of the WebPlatform project.

The Qt Project is an open collaboration effort to coordinate the development of the Qt software framework. Initially founded by Nokia in 2011, the project is now led by The Qt Company.

SwellRT was a free and open-source backend-as-a-service and API focused to ease development of apps featuring real-time collaboration. It supported the building of mobile and web apps, and aims to facilitate interoperability and federation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Projects</span>

KDE Projects are projects maintained by the KDE community, a group of people developing and advocating free software for everyday use, for example KDE Plasma and KDE Frameworks or applications such as Amarok, Krita or Digikam. There are also non-coding projects like designing the Breeze desktop theme and iconset, which is coordinated by KDE's Visual Design Group. Even non-Qt applications like GCompris, which started as a GTK-based application, or web-based projects like WikiToLearn are officially part of KDE.

References

  1. "WikiFM cambia faccia! | WikiFM blog" (in Italian). Blog.wikifm.org. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
  2. "WikiFM patrocinato da Wikimedia Italia! | WikiFM blog" (in Italian). Blog.wikifm.org. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
  3. "[kde-community] Incubating project". kde.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  4. "Incubator/Projects/WikiToLearn - KDE Community Wiki".
  5. "Another KDE success story - the Incubator - Part 1". KDE.news. 17 August 2015. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  6. "akademy2015: Akademy 2015 Program". kde.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  7. "The HEP Software Foundation". hepsoftwarefoundation.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  8. "Hep Software Foundation". wikitolearn.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  9. "Hep Software Foundation/Philosophy of this site - WikiToLearn - collaborative textbooks". wikitolearn.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  10. "Training".[ permanent dead link ]
  11. "Contributing to WikiToLearn/Uni list - WikiToLearn - collaborative textbooks". wikitolearn.org. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  12. "WikiRating Proposition Version 0.1" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-10-14.