Small wiki toolkits

Small wiki toolkits project logo

Photo of opening ceremony at Wikimania 2019 where Small Wiki Toolkits was introduced as a focus area — Small Wiki Toolkits focus area introduced in the opening ceremony at Wikimania 2019

Welcome! This is an initiative to support small wiki communities in learning and sharing technical skills.

This page describes the toolkits and provides information about the initiative, including how you can help.

Browse the toolkits

Toolkits are collections of recommended tools and educational resources. They focus on specific technical skills for developing, growing, and maintaining small wikis. You can use these toolkits to learn a variety of technical skills, or use them in workshops to teach more people.

Configure your site

Learn to change the configuration of your wiki:
- Understand how to request and make configuration changes.
- Customize the main page.
- Change the sidebar of your wiki.

Analyze data with Lua

Learn Lua to get data from Wikidata into infobox templates:
- Read the Lua Tutorial.
- Watch this video (90 min, on Youtube).

Starter kit

Resources, tools, and recommendations in technical areas relevant to smaller wikis that are getting started.

Translate wiki content

Train others on how to translate wiki pages from English into their language (source).

Write scripts and gadgets

Manage projects, bugs, and feature requests

Use Wikimedia APIs

Build and deploy tools

Learn to deploy your first tool on Toolforge:
- Watch this video (10 min, on Youtube).
- Read the "Getting started" tutorials on the Toolforge portal.

Ask your technical questions

Is something unclear? Please ask! Good places to ask are usually the Support desk on mediawiki.org (if a question about MediaWiki itself), some mailing lists and IRC chat channels, the Tech page on meta-wiki (if it's about a Wikimedia wiki), or the talk pages of the links above after you have checked that the talk page has actually been active lately.

You can also join the Small Wiki Toolkits Telegram group.

Help with this initiative

Do you have an idea for building technical capacity in your wiki community? Are you interested in workshops, virtual events, toolkits, video tutorials, or interested in exchanging problems and challenges in smaller wiki communities? Add a comment on the discussion page!

People working on this project organize and track what to work on in the Small-Wiki-Toolkits Phabricator project. We sometimes have video meetings, and we have a Small Wiki Toolkits Telegram group.

Develop toolkits

Toolkits provide a limited number of links to high-quality, task-oriented ("How can I…?") material. This often requires improving existing documentation first, to be consistent, up-to-date, and in plain English. We discuss existing documentation pages for a specific area in a corresponding Phabricator task, instead of listing ten "See Also" links for one topic on this very page. Ideally, we would also love to have short, well-done video tutorials on some topics, with subtitles that could be translated.

If you want to develop and document a toolkit yourself, here are some recommendations:

Toolkits should be task- and user-oriented. The question to answer is "How can I solve this problem?", not "Can you tell me more about this technology area?".
Use the toolkit presentation template slides. The template is also available in ODP file format.
Include notes for trainers on the slides where applicable so that both potential trainers or learners can benefit from it. For reference, see user scripts and gadgets toolkit source and its PDF version with detailed notes.
Upload your toolkit with detailed notes on Wikimedia Commons & add the Small wiki toolkits category. In the File Description, add a link to the PDF source if you are willing to let a potential trainer make a copy and modifications to the source. See for reference, the description section of these slides on Wikimedia Commons.

Organize a workshop

Interested in starting a workshop series or initiative? The workshop guide describes the roles and responsibilities of organizers and mentors of small wiki toolkits. For more info, contact us on the talk page.

Past events

Participants at Indic Wikimania Hackathon presenting their ideas

2022

Monthly technical workshops (January-October, Online)
- Technical workshops on bots and scripts development (report)
Indic Wikimania Hackathon 2022 (August 12-14, Bangalore, India)
- Brainstorming session on technical learning needs and preferred learning formats (summary and notes)

2021

Small wiki toolkits – South Asia
- An initiative to deliver technical skills to volunteers working on Wikimedia projects in the South Asian region.
Small wiki toolkits – Kurdish Wikimedians
- An initiative to deliver technical skills to volunteers promoting Kurdish culture and language across wiki projects.

2020

Celtic Knot Conference 2020, (2020 July 9-10, Online Event)
- Starter kit for smaller wikis feedback session (Summary and Notes)
SWT Indic Workshop Series 2020 (2020 June)
- Four technical workshops were conducted (Summary and Notes)
Wikimedia Hackathon 2020 (2020 May)
- Session: Tools for smaller wikis, your favorite cup of tea, and the weather! (Summary and Notes)

2019

WikiConference North America 2019 (2019 November 8-11, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
- Understanding the technical challenges of small wikis in North America workshop (Summary and Notes)
WikiArabia 2019 (2019 October 4-6, Marrakesh, Morocco)
- How to Build Technical Capacity for the Arabic Community (workshop)
Wikimania 2019 (2019 August 14-18, Stockholm, Sweden)
- Small wiki toolkits focus area (Summary and Notes; Wrap-up blog post)

Members

Members are free to self-identify as Small wiki toolkits group members. You may do so by editing the members list below and adding the following userbox to your user page by typing {{User SWT}}. Also, add this page to your watchlist to receive notifications about changes made to its content or discussion page.

This user is a member of the Small wiki toolkits group.