Your community should discuss to implement the new P&E Dashboard functionalities

Author: Joalpe

Summary: New set of functionalities for the P&E Dashboard has been released, and implementation has to be discussed in communities as they trigger on automatic publications in projects.

The Programs & Events Dashboard, the web tool to manage and track Wikimedia programs, particularly education programs, is constantly being developed, and a new set of functionalities has been released. As it was described by the developers, Sage Ross and Medha Bansal, these functionalities enable wiki edits from the Dashboard. In order to be able to use these functionalities, education program leaders must launch a discussion on their projects to inform the community about the tool and about the enabling of automatic edits. On the community in Portuguese, this discussion has already taken place, and it was the first community to release --as a test case-- these functionalities.

The goal is to straighten and strengthen the connection between program users and experienced users, thus fostering the sense of community in our projects. The new functionalities also contribute to manage the programs, especially large programs.

Automatic edits

New functionalities of the P&E Dashboard include:

On-Wikipedia page of the program: As soon as you create a program on the Dashboard it will generate a page on Wikipedia, thus becoming it easier for the community to follow what achievements the program is reaching. Example of an automatic program page on Portuguese Wikipedia.
Automatic identification of students: As soon as a student joins your program on the Dashboard he/she will be identified on his/her user page as a member of the program, thus becoming it easier for the community to understand the context of his/her contributions. Example of an automatic student identification page on Portuguese Wikipedia.
Automatic publication of instructions for students: As soon as a student joins your program on the Dashboard he/she will receive on his/her talk page a set of instructions that are directed specifically for enrollees of outreach and education programs (that you can actually create yourself as an education program leader). The discussion page will normally also hold the identification of the program. Example of an automatically generated student discussion page on Portuguese Wikipedia.
Assigned entry identification: As soon as you assign an entry for your student to work on, a note will be published on the discussion page of the entry identifying that the content is being improved in the context of a program. Example of an automatically generated tag on the discussion page of an entry on Portuguese Wikipedia.

How to implement the functionalities

From my own experience, the community has been very receptive and the implementation of new functionalities was very easy. Moreover, the development team has released a step-by-step guide on how to implement the functionalities.

The guide has three main steps: Get community consensus; Create the templates; and Share the created templates with User:Sage (Wiki Ed). This user will check the templates and if they are working release the automatic-edit functionalities.

As I have gone through the process of enabling the automatic edits in my community, make sure to reach out if you need assistance, as well.

Tags: P&E Dashboard, education programs, outreach programs