Wikipedia Education Program/Dashboard/FAQ

Get ready to contribute to open scholarship and education for all The Dashboard provides tools that help everyone share their knowledge and track their contributions.

What does the Program and Events Dashboard do?
The Program and Events Dashboard is a new web application that helps groups of contributors improve and review articles together.

How is the Programs and Events dashboard being built?
The Wikimedia Foundation has allocated a very small budget to us, in order to replace the Education Program extension. We have partnered with the Wiki Education Foundation, whose flagship application is used by hundreds of college courses to edit English Wikipedia for credit. We are adapting this dashboard to work for our more general environment, and anticipate use from schools of all age levels, editathons, writing contests and more, in every language and project. See below for how you can get involved--help is especially needed at this early stage.

What is the Wiki Ed Dashboard?
The Wiki Ed Dashboard is software that is being developed by the Wiki Education Foundation to help manage their Wikipedia classroom assignments (university level courses in the USA and in Canada involving English Wikipedia). It allows various stakeholders to quickly get a high level summary of activity (number of classes, students, articles touched, etc.) and also offers more details for each cohort (students registered who have completed the assigned training, articles selected/assigned, summary of on-wiki contributions). The Wiki Ed Dashboard is not on-wiki, but uses OAuth to verify a user’s Wikimedia account, and also creates course pages and talk page notifications on wiki.

What is the education extension?
The Education Program Extension is a Mediawiki extension designed for the Wikipedia Education Program to manage classroom courses on wiki. The extension allows for the creation of course pages and talk page notifications on the Wikimedia project where it is installed. It is installed by community request. The software allows for a cohort of users (students) to select (or be assigned) Wikipedia articles to edit. We aim at replacing it entirely with the new dashboard in 2017.

Why not fix the education extension?
Unfortunately the extension is not at the point where it can be kept on the wikis as it is. There is a long list of issues with the extension, ranging in severity from nuisance to security issues (the restricted tasks linked there). Further, if new security issues are discovered, or the ones we know about are actively exploited, the engineering staff may have to disable the extension while it is still in use, presenting a risk to education programs which are actively using the education extension. Addressing all of these issues will require rewriting significant portions of the extension, and we weren't able to find the resources to make that happen; we managed instead to build a small team that, in a few weeks, can develop the Programs and Events Dashboard.

While the education team was unable to gain support or resources to address issues with the extension (noted above), we are taking advantage of an opportunity to provide a valid alternative through the Dashboard.

How did we decide to improve the Dashboard?
When looking at investing in a tool for the education community in the Wikimedia movement, there were three options: recreate the education extension from the ground up (see above explanation), write entirely new code, or adapt software that was already developed for this purpose. Since WikiEd has invested heavily in their open source dashboard software (running on w:Ruby on Rails), which has been successfully used on the English Wikipedia since 2015, we realized we would have more impact by iterating on a good piece of existing software. Also, we evaluated other work being done in the Wikimedia communities for which a similar tool was needed. We found that it made sense to broaden the scope to include other programs and events in the Dashboard. The improved dashboard software will be a program management tool for the global Wikimedia community(ies).

Why is it called the Program and Events Dashboard?
The Program Capacity and Learning (PC&L) team at the WMF recognizes that a program management tool, more broadly construed, would be useful for more types of scenarios. We have seen people hacking existing tools like the education extension and the dashboard to fit non-education needs. Terms like “course page” and “student” are appropriate for Wikipedia classroom assignments, but by broadening the terminology used, the software can be useful for workshop attendees, editathon events, and content writing competitions.

Does WMF have resources for this project?
A small group of Wikimedia Foundation spent the month of February adapting the WikiEd Dashboard. We have engineering, program management and community liaison staff working together on the product. We hope to have a minimum viable product (MVP) that meets our goals of broader program and event support and internationalization (multi-wiki support). These WMF staff are working alongside the Wiki Education Foundation to adapt the software so that it can meet the needs of the US / Canada Education Program and Visiting Scholars Program run by Wiki Ed, as well as be applicable for international programs and events run by volunteers and affiliates.

Who will take care of maintenance for this tool?
The PC&L team is assessing whether we can make room in the WMF’s annual plan for 2016 - 2017 to ensure that maintenance, bug fixing and needed improvements will be taken care of. The Wiki Ed Foundation continues to use and improve the software, which ensures that a certain amount of maintenance is taken care of on their end.

As we broaden this tool beyond education and English Wikipedia, we will need to resolve other issues like program and event moderation, which Wiki Ed currently does for their courses on their dashboard. We expect to resolve this in collaboration with our global program leaders and communities.

How can I help?
The Program and Events Dashboard work is being organized on Phabricator. Please feel free to take part in the the process or discussions around specific tasks. The work is being documents on wiki here, where you can also contribute user stories or discussion.

Specific roles we can use help with:
 * Testing: early March 2016
 * Translation: You can help translate the dashboard interface to your language.
 * Documentation / how to’s:
 * Reporting and fixing bugs: add a Phabricator task
 * Update this FAQ!

Screenshots
Here's what the MVP of the Dashboard (and an example course within it) may look like.