If you’re here, I’m guessing you’re interested in open source, Wikimedia, Outreachy, or maybe all of the above. I hope you get the best of what you came for! This article is a deep dive into the Wiki Education project . But before that, let’s take a look at the community this project is maintained by.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that provides the essential infrastructure for free knowledge. It hosts Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, which I assume you’ve used countless times. It also hosts fourteen related open-collaboration projects and supports the development of MediaWiki—the software that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Let me clear up one common confusion: Wikimedia is not the same as Wikipedia.

Most of the work done within the Wikimedia Foundation is by volunteers from around the world. These volunteers create and edit Wikipedia articles (commonly referred to as "wikis") and contribute to the development of the software that runs these projects.

In 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation spun off Wiki Education as an independent nonprofit organization. The main goal of this organization is to engage students and academics in improving Wikipedia. Wiki Education fosters learning by encouraging students to actively interact with the information they consume on Wikimedia projects. This transforms them from passive information consumers into proactive knowledge creators—a goal they’ve successfully achieved over the past decade through a platform called the Wiki Education Dashboard.

The Wiki Education Dashboard, as the name suggests, is a project of the Wiki Education Foundation. It’s a web application that supports Wikipedia education assignments, edit-a-thons, and other editing projects. The aim is to improve Wikipedia’s content through contributions from university students and the general community.

The Dashboard has two main sites:

1. Wikipedia Student Program Dashboard:
   This version engages students and professors across various disciplines to improve Wikipedia while learning about their subject areas. Participants gain insights into how information is created and how to research and write educational articles for an encyclopedia.

2. Programs & Events Dashboard (P&E Dashboard):
   This open version of the Dashboard is used by the global Wikimedia community. Known as the P&E Dashboard (or Peony Dashboard), it is used by thousands of program organizers worldwide to support over 10,000 events across about 300 different wikis. It’s the most widely used tool for organizing edit-a-thons, Wikipedia classroom projects, and other newcomer-focused wiki programs.

Getting Started With The Dashboard

Here is a contribution guide to get started .To get the most out of the platform, you’ll need to dive into Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR), even if you’re comfortable with JavaScript. I recommend starting with the Odin Project and, most importantly, the Rails documentation. These resources will help you understand how to navigate the codebase, before you start getting your hand dirty with fixing bugs.

While working on my Internship project on this Platform, the most exciting part of working on the test suite for this platform is that I get exposure to every bit and piece of the project. The codebase has been written and tested by industry experts, which means I need to have a deep understanding of every feature before venturing into fixing or optimizing tests.

Some of the tests fail due to a range of causes—from internal issues to external dependencies on third-party packages. This offers a wide scope to experiment and learn from.

For reference I have an article where I discuss in details what my project is all about

Key Concepts

Now, always keep in mind that the Dashboard is primarily about managing Wikipedia articles, users, and the programs they’re involved in. You can create courses, add articles from Wikipedia to your course, allow your students to edit them, and track their activities and progress. This makes grading and evaluating their work much easier.

Here are a couple of concepts I found confusing at first:

• Wiki: A form of hypertext publication on the internet that is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be publicly edited or restricted for internal knowledge bases.

• Revisions: Revisions refer to changes made to a page on Wikipedia. Each change is stored in the database along with information about what was changed and who made the change.
  Here’s an example of how a sample revision might look: