Learning-by-doing MediaWiki
| Title | Learning-by-doing MediaWiki |
|---|---|
| Author | Manuel Nicola Primitivi |
| Date | 2025-08-01 |
| Project | 2023-2-IT03-ESC51-VTJ-000169977 |
Introduction
During my volunteering time at the Institute of Italian Culture I have worked, in collaboration with other volunteers and our coordinator, on the creation, development and promotion of WikiYouth, a website based on the Wiki model. WikiYouth is a website aimed at documenting the volunteering activities of the European Solidarity Corps (ESC), where volunteers, organisations and participants can share their experiences, stories and relevant information. Although it was initiated by us, WikiYouth is a collaborative platform, fully open-source, that can be further developed and ameliorated by volunteers and organisations’ members alike. WikiYouth has several purposes:
- Both volunteers and organisations can document the ESC actives carried out during the projects, and volunteers can use it as a platform to publish articles, stories and reflections about their volunteering experience or about various aspects of the country where they volunteered.
- Local people who participated in the activities organised by volunteers and their organisations can share their experiences, providing further information about them, and be a testimony of the ESC impact on the local community.
- Organisations can create corporate pages to present their work, aims, structure, staff, projects and activities. It is therefore a useful tool both to keep track of their own management, and for everyone interested in knowing more about a certain organisation.
Therefore, WikiYouth seeks to be a platform which gives voice to volunteers, participants and organisations in order to share with others their stories and experiences. It can be useful for volunteers both to reflect on their volunteering experience and to document stories related to their volunteering or of the hosting country. Moreover, the website can also be beneficial for local community’s participants in the activities carried out by the volunteers to document their feedback and testimonies on the activities organised by the organisations, while also showing the impact of ESC project in the local country. The platform can therefore be a great source of information for everyone interested in the ESC, such as ESC volunteers, organisations’ members, local participants and potential volunteers. Moreover, the platform has valuable features for organisations and their staff, making the website useful also for internal management.
Since the overarching theme motivating our activities was media literacy, we have devoted a great share of our time working on this project aimed at developing a platform for volunteers in the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) framework and the organisations involved. It has been a great learning opportunity as, following the learning-by-doing approach, I have acquired several digital skills. The role of our coordinator has been crucial both for the successful development of the platform and for my personal learning process, as he has helped us in facing technical challenges and in directing the overall work.
In this report I will present the general technical structure of the website in an accessible and understandable way, outlining also the overall functioning of the platform, focusing on my contributions to the development of the platform and on the knowledge I have gained.
WikiYouth: the front end
Our work on the WikiYouth website was focused on making the platform more appealing and user-friendly. We primarily developed the visual elements of the website, in order to provide a better experience in navigating the latter. Moreover, we have worked through our network to promote the use of the platform by other ESC volunteers as a tool to tell and share their experiences, with the aim of inspiring new possible volunteers.
Therefore, our work on the development of the website has been twofold: on the one hand we have worked on the frontend of the website, that is its general design and on features aimed at a better presentation of its contents; on the other hand, we have worked as well on the backend of the website, in order to ensure the correct functioning of the website and to create certain features (with various goals and functions depending on the specific case) that require a coding work to be implemented. However, overall, both tasks are aimed at a more pleasant and effective use of the website both by the audience and by the contributors. In fact, we made sure to have a somewhat satisfying result before promoting the use of the website to other volunteers from different countries and organisations. The main objective of our work for the development of the website has been precisely the one of creating a platform for anyone involved and interested in the ESC.
Our biggest achievement was the creation of a new main page that is both functional and aesthetically pleasant. It includes all the main sections of the website, which can, in this way, be easily navigated. It also includes useful documents and resources in regards to ESC volunteering. The aim of the structure of the main page was not only to present the content of the website, but also to provide an easy way to contribute to the website by creating new content and adding new information. At the same time, we have worked to create the various sections present in the main page, which are dedicated to: the articles written on the website; the experiences shared by participants in the activities organised by volunteers; the organisations that are involved in the sending and hosting of volunteers. The section dedicated to the latest articles includes all the articles published on the website. The articles are written on the website by volunteers to share and report their experiences and stories during their project. The section dedicated to the experiences comprises the feedback and stories from the participants who took part in the activities organised by the volunteers. They can be found grouped together and can be browsed easily. The section dedicated to the organisations includes and describes the sending and hosting organisations of the volunteers who contributed to the website and/or published content on it. Regarding the organisations involved in the ESC, both as sending and hosting organisation, we have developed a system aimed at the management of such organisations. The database that we created allows to insert and navigate information about the projects implemented by the organisations, its staff members, the activities carried out during the projects, the locations where volunteers have conducted their work and the apartments provided to the volunteers. Moreover, there is a section dedicated to pictures taken during the activities done in each location. Such pictures are then shown, through a randomised selection, in the main page’s carousel.
WikiYouth is an open-source platform based on MediaWiki, the software that empowers Wikipedia. Its open-source and collaborative nature allows it to be edited and, potentially, improved by those who seek to contribute to their development and further implementation. Therefore, in all the aforementioned sections, there is the possibility to, after having created an account, contribute by writing an article, sharing an experience, adding an organisation and information related to it.
In order to design these different sections, we have worked on the backend of the website to create a functioning website that is also visually pleasant for the users.
WikiYouth: the back-end
Regarding the technical aspects, for the development of WikiYouth we have primarily used the wikitext language, common to all the other websites based on MediaWiki. It is a special markup language that is more easily usable by the general public than directly coding in different languages. This characteristic highly influences its functioning and relates to a specific vision of collaborative development of the platform themself. This feature has allowed us to work on WikiYouth, learning its mechanism while using the wikitext language. In fact, the changes that we made in order to create a more easily usable website, were realised by analysing similar effective cases and solutions present on other websites. Subsequently, we adapted these solutions to our specific case. In this way, we were able to learn the functioning of websites and how to analyse their different components. Another essential source of information were the documentation pages provided by MediaWiki, where we found directions for the creation and adaptation of elements such as images, internal links and headers. Nonetheless, we always had to take into account the specific context of WikiYouth, thus, adapting the directions provided to the needs of our website.
The decision of the required changes depends, in fact, on the general design of the website after errors have been noticed, features prove to be unfunctional or do not work properly, or if users experience difficulties in adding data. This aspect represents an essential characteristic of the methodology of our work, which allows us to make changes on an already existing basis, searching for better working solutions or which are more suitable for use cases required by our website. Therefore, every single feature of the website has been planned bearing in mind its general design, but also its specific characteristics.
However, this also implied the need for using different programming languages, such as in the case when it was necessary to use dynamic links with queries, or when logics more complex than wikitext were needed. In such cases, for example, we studied and applied, thanks to the help and the guidance of our coordinator, programming languages such as Lua or Javascript. Similarly, we understood how to use the CSS language in order to structure and organise the elements of the website for an optimal user experience.
Concerning the work on the backend of the website, we had the opportunity to learn and apply our new knowledge on the different functionalities of the wiki platform. In particular, it was essential to give structure to the components of the website; in that way, the articles and the data written by users (such as volunteers and members of the organisations) can be shown and included in the most correct and orderly way. For that reason, we worked with features such as templates and related (json) schemas; in other words, models that establish which data are selected and also their visualisation in the website. Moreover, such models are essential to establish the way in which the data are represented on the website.
In the main page we have included a section dedicated to the data structure of the website, which shows how each specific feature is used in the platform, where it is employed and what is its purpose. The two main elements that build the website are forms and templates.
The forms allow users to create and edit pages on the website, that is basically to add any sort of data on the platform, such as an article, a testimony, an organisation and information related to it. The templates (or more specifically “parser-functions”) allow to retrieve specific information from the database by sending a request to the database, allowing the user to access and extract data from the database based on specific criteria: this action is known as “querying data”. The users can also edit the query/parser function itself and create new ones, based on the needs identified. Both forms and VisualData's queries are based on a schema, which defines the properties (particular information and data) defining an item. For example, in order to submit the form for the creation of an article, the user needs to fill specific information, such as the title and author, which are defined in the related schema. It is relevant to mention that to employ, create and modify such forms and queries, programming is not required. To the average user, the form appears as any other regular form to fill out with the required information, making it easy to upload data on the website. After the successful submission of such forms, a page with the filled in information is created. Therefore, this rather simple technical tool allows contributors not only to upload information on the website as users, but also to modify its internal functioning, without any programming knowledge required.
The templates allow to include the same element on several pages of the website. Templates are essential in order to perform specific actions which wouldn’t be possible otherwise, such as the creation of the info-box in the articles. The interesting and relevant aspect of templates, is that they can be reused in any page, working in the same way in every case. In other words, the content of the templates is transcluded in other pages: its content is included somewhere else by referencing it, without the need to enter the same information multiple times. Therefore, the transclusion links the template to the target pages where its content should appear. In order to modify the content, the template should be edited, instead of the target pages. As such, an edit of the template will affect all its related target pages. In the page dedicated to the data structure of WikiYouth, every user can see the used templates, where they are used and what is their function. As an example, the aforementioned info-box for articles is present in all the articles published on the website, and its purpose is to collect and show data about the article.
In the data structure page, we have also included a section for the discussion of potential edits to the website and for identifying the things that should be done to enhance the platform. This highlights the collaborative aspect of WikiYouth.
Conclusion
To conclude, during my volunteering time we have successfully created a website fruitful for everyone involved in the European Solidarity Corps. The outcomes that I identify from having worked in this activity are twofold. First of all, I have enriched my digital skills, acquiring a great deal of useful knowledge and gaining extensive understanding in this context. Secondly, I believe that with my contribution I have made a potential positive impact on the future of the European Solidarity Corps, since what we have created can be extremely functional and beneficial for volunteers, participants and organisations alike.