The Wiki Education Dashboard / Programs & Events Dashboard is a Ruby on Rails + React.js application that helps people organize groups of newcomers to contribute to Wikipedia. It's used by the global Wikipedia Education Program for Wikipedia writing assignments in college and high school classes, the Art + Feminism editathon campaign, and many other thematic in-person and online outreach projects.
One of the initial first steps towards successful Wikipedia authorship is the selection of appropriate content to edit or create. An "Article Finder" tool will help instructors and students search for and select articles in need of editing and contribution. The basic concept is to build a tool that lets users explore a particular topic area on Wikipedia to identify articles that are in need of improvement and are relevant to their program or event, so that participants have a good set of possible topics to work on.
The dashboard has a rough, simplistic proof-of-concept, but it's not practical for use by instructors and program organizers and is not integrated into the rest of the dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/article_finder
For this project, you will:
* Build a new Article Finder tool for dashboard's program pages, using React.js
* Integrate the Article Finder into the dashboard's system for "available articles" so that program leaders can use it to curate a set of appropriate topics for their events
* Evaluate and improve the basis for identifying articles in need of improvement, based on ORES data, view data, previous research (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Increasing_article_coverage ), existing tools (Suggest Bot), existing collections of articles (eg, WikiProject worklists), and other data sources
The problem of identifying appropriate articles for newcomers to work on is a big and open-ended one, and so this project is open-ended as well. But enough tools and strategies and data sources are available already that we can see the potential for some kind of article finder tool in the dashboard.
This project will be based in Javascript — mainly React.js and Redux — interacting with Ruby on Rails on the server. Knowledge of Javascript is a prerequisite. Additional helpful skills and experience include:
* React.js and Redux
* Ruby, and Ruby on Rails
* User interface design
* Experience with Wikipedia content evaluation and curation
* Knowledge of Wikipedia's API
Mentors:
* @Ragesoss (product, Wiki Education Foundation)
* @Capt_Swing (user research, Wikimedia Foundation)
Get started:
* Set up a development environment: https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard/blob/master/docs/setup.md
* Talk with us: email sage [at] wikiedu.org for an invite to our Slack channel, or ping Sage (ragesoss) in #wikimedia-ed on Freenode IRC
* Some possible microcontributions: https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22newcomer+friendly%22