User:Jamesmontalvo3

I'm a MediaWiki user, administrator and developer. Darenwelsh and I introduced Semantic MediaWiki at NASA's Johnson Space Center to solve massive knowledge management problems within the EVA community, and we're currently trying to expand that to other organizations within Mission Operations.

My day job is at NASA training astronauts how to perform EVAs (spacewalks), writing procedures for those EVAs, and helping astronauts execute their EVAs as an EVA flight controller in MCC.

Visit me on GitHub.

My extensions
Extensions I've created:

CopyWatchers

Extensions I've made substantial additions to:

Talkright -- Header Footer -- Approved Revs

Extensions I've made small contributions to:

None at this time

Future extensions I intend to create:

WatchStrength -- HideShowSidebar

2011
In late 2011 one of my coworkers, Darenwelsh, attempted to convince me that it was a good idea to organize the vast quantities of EVA knowledge using a wiki. I was not convinced, thinking it a more structured database method would be more effective, but I setup an installation of MediaWiki for him to experiment with. In an attempt to meet him halfway in the wiki-vs-structured-database debate, I installed the External Data extension and created a very simple CRUD interface to populate our structured data.

2012
More info needed...basically our wiki took off as a sort of guerilla project. By the end of the year it has a relatively large user base and many regular contributors, despite not being an approved project.

I will be updating this to include info on hurdles we had to overcome...

2013
More info needed...our wiki became an approved project. Now several interwikis are possibly going to spring up.

I became a MediaWiki developer by necessity, as we upgraded from MW 1.17 to 1.20 (then 1.21), and several of the extensions we relied upon required modification. Additionally, I created the CopyWatchers extension to allow our Meeting Notes form (which uses Semantic Forms) to automatically add watchers from pages related to the meeting minutes.