User:Ruphy/WikiFM

WikiFM is a collaborative, international, free knowledge project, run entirely by volunteers, and dedicated to the creation of free and accessible scientific textbooks. Since December 2013 it is part of the KDE project.

History
WikiFM was created in Milan, in May 2012, by a group of science students from the University of Milan Bicocca. WikiFM was originally launched as a private wiki for exchange of links, suggestions and other information related to studying at the University of Milan Bicocca.

However, much original content was beginning to be produced by the students, and even if still at the early stages, the creators of the website started to realize the potential of a fully collaborative website. Following a big restyle, in May 2013 the site was publicly announced, thanks to the contribution of the University of Milan Bicocca which funded the printing of some advertisement material.

In September 2013 WikiFM got the sponsorship of Wikimedia Italia. In December 2013, WikiFM officially joined the KDE project, by entering, as first project, KDE's incubator program.

The vision
Instead of being a project financed by some non-profit foundation which employs professional publishers, WikiFM is the result of the combined effort of many volunteers in the academic world.

The content is written by both students, who started to create textbooks while studying the subject in question, and professors, who provide thorough fact-checking and accuracy. For this historical reason, while the project has an international aim, most of the content is still in Italian.

The collaboration model
WikiFM works on a model similar to many open projects, including Wikipedia. Every user of the website has the right to view and edit all the content present on the website.

Given the deep technical nature of the topics, there is a mechanism of draft reviewing which has been put in place in order to ensure the correctness of the articles. While every user has the right to modify the wiki text, doing so results in the article being put in "draft" mode. Every user can afterwards select whether they want to see the latest edit or the latest reviewed version.

There is a community of trusted reviewers who regularly check the accuracy of the edits done to articles. A formal policy for becoming a reviewer has not been decided, as of December 2013.

Content and internationalization
The content of WikiFM is, for historical reasons, mostly written in Italian. This, however, can be in contrast with the ideas of universal access to free knowledge which the project set for itself.

The plans to make WikiFM multilingual, which (as of December 2013) have not yet been implemented, mostly for lack of resources.