Wikimini — the Software Development Project For Social Good at deploy(impact) 2022
We at women++ are on a mission to increase diversity in tech in Switzerland by facilitating hands-on tech project experience for those women transitioning into the tech industry or wishing to upskill and lead their careers in tech.
deploy(impact) is our latest initiative, a software development project for social good. A program that brings together the collaboration of industry leaders as #mentors, tech enthusiasts of all levels, including women transitioning to the tech sector, and project owners that guide the development of software solutions to impact a social cause.
As a participant, deploy(impact) is the perfect opportunity to learn by doing how to develop a product from A to Z, following an agile workflow of a product’s full life-cycle: from business requirements definition to delivering an MVP.
“Wikimini” is an initiative financed by Wikimedia CH and is the chosen #softwaredevelopment project that 4 out of 9 deploy(impact) teams will work on. Participants will redesign the existing platform, creating 4 alternative improved software solutions during the 6-week sprints.
The concept to create Wikimini was brought to Wikimedia CH by an elementary school teacher and the proposition was to create an online encyclopedia written by children and teenagers, with help from teachers, to encourage peer learning.
Behind the concept of creating Wikimini, as described by Ilario Valdelli — Innovation & Education Program Manager at Wikimedia Switzerland, was the problem that often when you research something in Wikipedia you are presented with a long, very detailed, and formally written article that is not suitable to the understanding level of kids and teenagers.
Wikimini was then launched in 2008 with the slogan — an online encyclopedia written by kids, for kids! — providing free knowledge in shorter and simpler articles in a language that matches its target audience — primary and elementary students.
Since its creation, Wikimini has faced various problems concerning software, implementation, etc and most recently, Wikimedia CH considered closing the project as it has stagnated for years. However, before killing it completely, Ilario Valdelli assessed the platform and realized that although nothing much had been done recently to update it, it still had lots of traffic, and users were even downloading materials, proving that it is a valuable source of knowledge for the users and worth investing time and resources to modernize and improve the usability of the platform.
deploy(impact) teams kicked off their project on October 8, and on top of modernizing the platform and improving usability, they are also tasked with creating a children-friendly environment with a protected area for editing and enabling rich media with an open license. To support collaborative learning, one of the project requirements is to create a dashboard for teachers to monitor students’ activities, approve content to be published and measure the complexity of the content using chosen standards.
Mentoring deploy(impact) participants and acting as Project Owner on the Wikimini project will be Lavinia Malo, Education Programme Manager at Wikimedia Switzerland.
Valerio Bozzolan, also part of the Wikimedia Switzerland team, will be on hand offering technical support for this project Wikimini, which was created on Mediawiki, a software developed by Wikimedia Foundation.
Through the collaboration with women++, Wikimedia CH is looking to provide teachers with a tool that supports collaborative learning and meets today’s children’s expectations of active learning, or learning by doing. We can reassure Wikimedia CH that our participants are very focused and driven professionals, supported by very skilled mentors from sponsoring companies as well as the Wikimedia CH team, and everyone is fully committed to giving their best to bring Wikimini to its best version and continue sharing free knowledge among children and teenagers.
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