Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter/Past issues/11
This month:
Hello! Despite our last update being 11 months ago this time, WikiProject X is not dead! To clarify where we left off: basically, we were building an extension to actually implement a more robust solution to all the things we'd discovered in the previous year with the onwiki prototype. This extension, CollaborationKit, got to the stage of deployment to Wikimedia production, though is not yet live here (but you can now test it out on testwiki).
So now we basically just need to finish all the pre-enwp deployment stuff and then see how well it works in practice. James Hare and Brian Wolff now both work for the WMF, so as I'm the only one from the extension development side of things left not already working full-time on other stuff, I'll be aiming to do the bulk of the work now to get all this through and do the followup iterations.
To this end, I've submitted a new grant proposal to fund the actual work (because the supporting grant was an IEG, which is no longer a thing, a new Project Grant proposal is needed to pick up where that left off instead of doing another renewal) - the proposal outlines my general plan at this point while tying it back to the original IEG proposal. Any comments or feedback on that would be greatly appreciated.
Once CollarborationKit is deployed to the English Wikipedia, we are going to need WikiProjects to actually test it out in practice, but in the meantime it is possible to try recreating your WikiProject pages using CK on testwiki using Special:CreateCollaborationHub and seeing if even that much is actually doable. It's a bit broken at the moment and only admins actually have permissions for it, but it might be a good way to get an idea of the basics if you're interested. More on this later with some actual organisation, instructions, places for feedback, etc once the project gets properly going again.
Until next time,