Talk:Wikipedia Education Program

Interested in participating/advising.
Hello fellow Mediawiki-ers,

First I'd like to say I think this is a great idea. My past job was working on EcoliWiki and GONUTS in the Biochemistry/Biophysics department at Texas A&M University. We used the wikis a lot as academic hubs as well as educational resources. I spent a number of years working directly on tools and extensions for MW in an academic setting, and have a fair bit of experience with this. I'd love to help out with the development however I can, although I'm quite busy with my fulltime job. I'd also love to advise on this project if the need arises. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

--DanielRenfro (talk) 21:23, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Course Pages
The main issue I have with the course page is that even as an experienced user of MediaWiki wikis, I find editing the course page, after creation, too complex and sometimes impossible. Some of the auto-generated portions seem to become forever-fixed and I can't figure out how to change them. The teacher/student status also means that there are portions of the page that my students can't edit, but I WANT them to be able to edit it. It's a wiki! For many students, interacting with the course page is their first exposure to editing a wiki, but unfortunately the course page functions differently than the pages they are likely to edit on Wikipedia, or any other MediaWiki site. It would probably be better for students if, once created, the Course Page was just a standard wiki page, like any page one might find on Wikipedia. The guided creation process for faculty is great and simplifies things for them, but the ultimate output of that process needs to be plain text using MediaWiki markup so that it can be used to create a plain-old standard wiki page that anyone can edit. Brianwc (talk) 22:14, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with everything here, Brianwc. Unfortunately, fixing that core aspect of the extension will require some major reengineering, but we're looking into ways of doing it as easily as possible, separating the parts that should work like a normal wiki (the body of the course page, which should be editable like any other page) from the parts that rely on structured data. It's a very high priority, only tempered by the amount of work it will take versus some other improvements that will be much easier.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 4 December 2013 (UTC)