Mini MediaWiki Training Theni
CIS-A2k is trying to strengthen the MediaWiki movement in India, and over the last six months, the team has collaborated with different Indian Wikimedians and started a project called Indic-TechCom.
Indic-TechCom provides technical support to the Indic Wikimedia community and as of now has supported community members in Indic OCR and Indic Wikisource stats.
To increase the awareness on MediaWiki, Indic TechCom members and CIS-A2K decided to reach out to students with the Computer science background and help them understand how to contribute on MediaWiki. As a pilot project, we reached out to Nadar Saraswathi College of Engineering and Technology and organised a two-day long Mini MediaWiki training for the students on 22nd and 23rd of January 2019.
As part of the training, On Day 1, students were explained about MediaWiki and were introduced to Git, GitHub, Phabricator and Gerrit. We helped them to install MediaWiki software on their system and also helped them to understand the structure of MediaWiki.
In the second day, students were introduced to the extensions and skins, understanding the structure of extension and special pages. We also taught them how to submit patches through Gerrit.
This training had a group of 20 students and 2 faculty members who were supporting the students and guiding them in their native language. The first day of the event started slowly as students were lacking in having the knowledge of Wikimedia and its structure. After setting up the relation of the Wikimedia platform the students were able to understand the use and benefits of MediaWiki. Then the installation of MediaWiki and hosting of own MediaWiki server was done. Seven students were successfully able to install and play with Localsettings.php to get the grip of their sites.
At the end of the sessions, two[1][2] students were able to submit the patch to Gerrit and it was approved by Volker_E (Sr. User Experience Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation).
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