MediaWiki appropiation

This course is for MediaWiki beginners, planned for acquiring different essential skills around the tool: editing, installing, administrating and customizing it. Each part is designed to address a topic and increases in complexity, from edition basics and tricks to having one wiki ready for your own collaborative purposes.

So be ready to navigate through some practical instructions (mainly video resources, but also some detailed HowTos), to get your hands dirty editing wikis and, specially, to upload stuff and check URLs (and then all over again) until your wiki looks and works as you want it to.

The course is basically asynchronous, except for a couple of weekly office hours. The process will be based on weekly discussions, then activity, then wrapping up. Participants are expected to work in the course related tasks around 3-5 hours minimum per week on average.

There will be an activity goal for every week, with a previous discussion about it and about the resources/knowledge needed. Before going to the next activity we should evaluate outputs together and troubleshooting if needed. Note that after the second week activities will take place mainly at each participant's MediaWiki installation.

:: Week #1
General info about the tool (example of Wikipedia and other potential uses): What's MediaWiki? What's a wiki by the way? What's the connection with Wikipedia? Other examples? > Activity: benchmarking wikis

:: Week #2
Editing MediaWiki (basic stuff but also some advanced things): How does it work? Which are its basic features? How to use HTML there? What can be done with it? What not? > Activity: MediaWiki editing

:: Week #3
Installing MediaWiki and basic features (design): How to install MediaWiki? Which are the basic admin features and privileges? How to change design and CSS? > Activity: installing and basic customization

:: Week #4
Extensions (exploring basic ones and some on demand): What's an extension? Which interesting ones are out there? How to install and customize them? > Activity: adding extensions

:: Week #5
Semantic MediaWiki (general info and creating a basic form): What's semantic MediaWiki? Which are its basic features? How to create a basic form? > Activity: semantic installing and form creation

:: Week #6
Wraping up and IAQ: How do we communicate around a wiki? How do we connect it with Social Media? What to do in case of vandalism? > Activity: polishing our wiki and final questions

For all this activities each participant will be involved into testing and/or checking some other participant's activity, and in some occasions reporting to the group (while all of them should report to the course facilitator when needed). So the whole process of peer-to-peer learning here depends on each participant doing a minimum activity for creating their stuff (writing, uploading, modifying code) plus paying attention to some other person activity (checking what he does, or being its beta tester).