Hi everybody. I have started working on a Wikipedia article about Free Code Camp, but frankly, I didn’t get very far. The main impediment is that I’m way too busy with making a living at the minute (working in a book store), the other (minor) problem is that English is my second language and I’m struggling with grammar etc.
That means it looks and feels like a normal article, but it has a low search engine ranking and is almost invisible to the broader public. I plan to move it to the article namespace in the English Wikipedia once it’s sufficiently complete.
I invite every community member to contribute. You don’t even need a WP user account. Just click on “Bearbeiten”.
We requested an article from Wikipedia’s community almost 18 months ago (they have an official process for doing this, and as someone who has a ton of respect for Wikipedia and their processes, I wanted to follow the rules to the T.)
So I’m thrilled that this article will finally be written by a hard core Wikipedia contributor!
@tropicalchancer, @robgaston1, @farooqzafar, @QuincyLarson Thanks a lot, guys! With four contributors we will get this done in no time at all! We can use this thread to coordinate our efforts if necessary. Also, I highly recommend the Changelog podcast with Quincy as a source. It has a lot of useful information.
I’m happy to use this thread unless someone has a better idea in terms of collaboration.
I am comfortable writing and happy to do so, but I have not contributed to a Wiki before. If multiple people are going to be involved, do we need to start with some form of outline of what the sections of this article might be?
Rather than just try to dive in and look over all the material, it would help me personally to have some kind of research focus. @janschreiber would you want to propose sections or should we start by submitting proposals for the sections?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy (The Udemy page on Wikipedia that we can use as a blueprint. Feel absolutely free to add more examples of similar pages.)
I guess the Udemy page can provide us with some clues on what we want to cover:
History
FCC was founded by Quincy Larson in October 2014 …
Curriculum
How many hours of work? What do you learn? Most of the programs students write will be tested automatically.
Reception
FCC has 600,000 registered campers as of November 2016. (Data from FCC’s own statistics page, I’ll ask Quincy if we need exact up-to-date data.)
We have a YouTube channel with hundreds of short videos on math, computer science, and software engineering concepts and technologies (youtube.com/freecodecamp)
Instead of emphasizing total registered campers (about 634,000) you could emphasize the number of people who use Free Code Camp’s platform every month (320,000) which shows the high level of activity among campers.
I’m happy to share any other stats that might be useful for the article.
@haiphi No, it is certainly not too late. To be honest, we haven’t even started doing real work so far. I appreciate everybody who is willing to contribute.
@janschreiber have either of you had a chance to start this? I think it will only take a little time to create this post. When you do, please create it as “freeCodeCamp” instead of “Free Code Camp” as we are formally switching to that name.
It could be "FreeCodeCamp (often stylized as freeCodeCamp).
I haven’t started working on it yet. All I’ve done so far is create a Wikipedia account for myself. @janschreiber can we chat to discuss it more as far what each person will be doing? Also, can we move the conversation to Gitter or Slack? It everyone agrees, I’ll create the group in Gitter or Slack.
And 2nd… build it here and port it once or build it there based on comments/additions here?
Number 1 lends itself to this forum and number 2 might be another opportunity for new people to contribute via GitHub and get all that good pull request practice (should probably be it’s own repo etc) with just a text doc instead of code on top of GitHub… but downside is it might scare off new people who aren’t comfortable with GitHub.
In my opinion, It would just make things unnecessarily complicated if we introduced another tool such as git into the process. The software that powers Wikipedia is intended for collaborative editing and has its own version control. I don’t think building the page with git would add any benefit.
Figured as much from what I’ve read about it. Haven’t used it yet. Well once, and I got a very ‘stack-overflow’ kind of response (this was many years ago)…
My only point with using GitHub is really o new people get it practice without i being code based. No value o building the article but somewhat of value to a group if new learning who will eventually learn git. No real attachment to doing it one way or the other otherwise.
@haiphi, please add me to the group as well… thanks!
