Google Global Impact Challenge
This week we learned of something called the Google Global Impact Challenge - http://www.globalimpactchallenge.withgoogle.com/
This is an initiative that seeks to encourage British non-profits to utilise technology to make the world a better place and transform people's lives for the better.
The programme is open to non-profits in the UK and there are four awards of £500,000 available to the winners, including the idea which receives the largest number of public votes.
The programme was shared on the wikimediauk-l mailing list and generated some discussion so this page is available for good ideas to be recorded and potentially developed.
The timescale for this is short – applications must be completed and submitted by 17 April. However, time is available if we act quickly, develop some ideas and make a recommendation to the Board of Wikimedia UK. This is a good opportunity to scope out some ideas which can then develop into full-scale projects if approved and the bid is successful, so please do get involved – we can make a huge positive difference if we are successful. Please note ideas here and use the talk page for discussion. Thank you. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 16:42, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
Online collaborative college
This idea is developed from some of the current thinking around the WMUK Virtual Learning Environment. For that we are applying Moodle, a standard course management system used in higher education. We are trying, piecemeal, to understand the issues behind making Moodle more collaborative. At present, it is fair to say, the usual assumption is that each course is written by a single person, or very small group.
Online education was very much in the news in 2012, but the ideas coming down from the big schools in the US don't seem to match the Wikimedia way of doing things. I think there is a great entry to be made, in the Google Challenge, that would be an ambitious effort to combine good features of MediaWiki and Moodle (which is particularly strong in hosting quizzes, for example).
It is hard to doubt that upgrading Wikipedia's success as a reference site, to full online education, would have a global impact. So I believe a strong entry could be based around new software development to make the idea of a collaborative system for authoring educational material a reality. The ideas are there: integrating MediaWiki and Moodle features would apparently take a serious project of PHP programming, though. Charles Matthews (talk) 18:49, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
Make Wikipedia more easily translateable by machine
Making the English Wikipedia more accessible to non-English speakers is a worthy objective and something which we could easily make a big difference to. Currently the main route for non-English speakers to access EN wiki is via Google translate and similar online translation services. If Google were willing to work with us, we could make an easy and uncontentious difference to that by getting AWB compatible lists of translation anomalies and where practical amending the Wikipedia article. I've been doing this on a small scale for years working my way though easily confused words like staring/starring and cavalry/calvary. It is now far less common to have Wikipedia articles about actors staring in particular movies or calvary armies charging into battle, and as for the throwing of discusses I've abolished an entire Olympic sport. My understanding of translation software is that it works on a probability basis, so if we were to get lists of articles and phrases on EN wiki that a particular translation software finds to be ambiguous and can only give a borderline probability to, we should be able to identify a lot of ambiguities and errors on EN wiki; Fixing these would benefit all editors but particularly those who depend on translation software.
Taking things to the logical next step, we could introduce a system of hidden templates to resolve words with multiple meanings such as bonnet, bolt, batter, tramp or pants. As well as transforming the quality of machine translation of the pedia, this would also make it easier to offer people a choice as to which version of English they view Wikipedia in.
Working in the opposite direction would be more contentious due to licensing, in fact I doubt we could help any translation software improve its own code unless they had a compatible license. I'd also be loathe to see us work with one set of machine translation software in a way that gave them an advantage over their competitors WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:49, 28 March 2013 (UTC)