Thekla lark: Beginning to develop CC World Univ & Sch in MediaWiki / Wikibase-Wikidata

Hi Tim, Daniel, Dario, Allen, Luis, Tighe, (Markus and Lydia),

Thanks for your recent excellent WMF talks, Allen and Markus - "Problematizing and Addressing the Article-as-Concept Assumption in Wikipedia," and "Understanding Wikidata Queries"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jpKRwPT-Q and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#June_2017) - which I found very informative and helpful, and timely for what follows especially.

As you may know, I'm developing CC MIT OCW-centric wiki World University and School, which is like CC Wikipedia (in 358 languages) with CC MIT OCW (in 7 languages) and CC Yale OYC, and CC WUaS donated WUaS to Wikidata in October 2015. WUaS seeks to develop major universities in all countries' official / main languages, and wiki schools for open teaching and learning in Wikipedia's 358 languages and eventually in all 7,099 living languages - beginning with this SUBJECT TEMPLATE : http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/SUBJECT_TEMPLATE. 

Thanks to Wikimedians Lydia, Ryan Kaldari and Jan Zerebecki, World University and School began developing in Mediawiki (but not in Wikibase/Wikidata), in English and German, from January (during the WikiDev conference in SF) to March 2016 but this the stopped working then. Here's a version of this in the web-archive - https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20150324001526/http://worlduniversityandschool.org/mediawiki-1.24.1/index.php?title=Main_Page - which I'd like to begin with again, but now in Wikibase/Wikidata too. Now that both Mediawiki and Wikibase/Wikidata have had one and a half years to develop further, I'd like to begin to re-install and develop WUaS in English and German (which I know at an intermediate level), as well as in Chinese and Spanish, which are WUaS pilot languages, and which were your test languages in your recent talks, Allen and Markus, I heard. Importantly, they are also 2 of CC4 MIT OCW's 7 languages - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/ .  MIT OCW's CC4 licensing allows for "sharing" and "adapting" but is "non-commercial," (while Wikisource's CC0 licensing, by contrast for example, is "commercial"). 

At a Wikimedia friend's recent suggestion, I'm going to begin to seek to install Mediawiki and Wikibase for wiki CC World University and School using - 

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide &  

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Installation.

But I'm a social scientist (having just written a large actual-virtual ethnographic book) and not too much of a coder, and found Jan and Kaldari's help invaluable in the installation of Mediawiki in January 2016. There are also a lot of potential planning considerations in developing World Univ & Sch in Mediawiki/Wikibase - including anticipating multiple languages and using Wikibase/Wikidata ... and potentially, as I talked about with Lydia this January 2017 at Wikidev, developing a WUaS bookstore using CC0 (commercial) Wikisource in a newly emergent wing at WUaS. (I've been talking with Silke, a German friend who works a quarter time in the Stanford bookstore, who's interested in organizing the online CC WUaS bookstore, first in English, but WUaS doesn't have a "front end" for this yet).

So Daniel (as Wikidata Principal Platform Engineer) and Tim (as Lead Platform Architect on the MediaWiki Platform team), as I proceed with attempting to install Mediawiki and Wikibase, could I please ask you some questions? And as language questions arise, beyond in English and German, could I ask you Allen and Luis about developing WUaS in Chinese and Spanish, please? And, Dario, as WUaS begins to develop our CC0 WUaS Bookstore emerging potentially out of Wikisource/Wikidata, could I please ask you about how this would work (potentially on your Talk pages - mine is Scott_WUaS - or here ... )? Thank you!

CC OCW WUaS is seeking to matriculate students this autumn for free since CC MIT OCW-centric online accrediting Bachelor's degrees, first in English, but soon in Chinese and Spanish, with the course catalog here - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/. 

Thank you so much. 

Scott

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