The WikiEducator environment

WikiEducator is where the Commonwealth of Learning has an excellent project for free e-learning content; I rate it as best of breed. As the Commonwealth of Nations consists of many countries in all parts of the world, WikiEducator has to take into account the many different cultures in order to provide quality education.

WikiEducator has invested in the development of its Open Source educational environment and this makes it a challenge to build an environment in the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment.

Many of the MediaWiki extensions are not in a code repository system. They are included as a text in a Wiki, sometimes they are just available to be downloaded. This has several drawbacks;

• the installer cannot load the code
• the code is not internationalised and localised at translatewiki.net
• it is not clear if there have been modifications to the code in the past

Even though it is not that hard to create a new extension in the WMF SVN, it is best when this is done either by the developers or by the people behind WikiEducator. When asked typically there is a positive response.

A special case is the LiquidThreads extension. This extension is broken in its latest revision. The testing environment makes it really easy to establish this or to find what effect other extensions have. The COL and Unicef are collaborating, it is fairly trivial to install and test the Uniwiki extensions in a combined environment as well.

The current incarnation of the WikiEducator testing environment can be found here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Selenium

The Wikiation Extension Testing Environment has so far concentrated on  server side issues. How do we install MediaWiki, how do we install extensions, how do we run tests serverside. The tests we currently run are parser tests and tests run using the pywikipedia framework.

This is all really nice but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and this is done with browsers. Given our values, tools to do the testing need to be freely licensed as well.

The great thing about Selenium is that it already has many add ons to do serious testing. It allows for automated testing for multiple browsers. It allows for using a grid of systems to do the testing. To me it looks exactly right. I asked MinuteElectron to look at it as well; he is really entheausiastic, he started to convert his work on Uniwiki into Selenium already.

The question is what do you think?
Thanks,
       GerardM

You can bank on it, together you do not need to invest as much

The Stanton project for MediaWiki usability will start in a few weeks. This does not mean that nothing is happening. Today I learned that a bank has spend considerable effort in introducing the UNICEF extensions. One of their programmers has spend considerable effort to improve the software. I have been told that much of this has been fed back to UNICEF. As the programmer is leaving the bank, I was happy to learn that he is allowed to take with him all the code involved.

This programmer does so far not have SVN commit rights. I learned that he is going to work for another company.. Another company interested in implementing the UNICEF extensions.

What this proves to me, is the need for collaboration between all these organisations that develop MediaWiki. It is more effective to work together. Better results can be achieved for the same costs when coordination becomes a priority..

I had a word with Erik.. He told me that MediaWiki already has something like the CreatePage extension in core. It is part of a search result...

What else happens when you click on Uniwiki or what else happens when you click on Create Page..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Betawiki supports Uniwiki extensions

The Uniwiki extensions were developed by UNICEF. They were developed based on usability studies. Studies that found that that 100% of newbies were not able to create a new article in a MediaWiki environment, studies that help explain why so many of our projects do not grow as we want them to do.

We have been doing some testing, and we have found that this software does not work against the bleeding edge software used by the Wikimedia Foundation. Siebrand had a look and fixed the localisation, MinuteElection has a look and fixed a bug.

We are currently talking with Kennisnet and we aim to get in contact with UNICEF. We really think it is important to get more usability into MediaWiki this will help the smallest 80% of our projects a lot.

In the meantime, I am really happy to announce that Betawiki now supports the localisation or the 12 Uniwiki extensions. In anticipation of finding support for these extensions, Siebrand has opened up the localisation for these important extensions.
Thanks,
GerardM