This is something I tell our editors often but if you have skills that are not purely wiki maintaining (e.g. writing entries), there’s a 90% chance we can find something you can work on. This works for your hobbies too or stuff you’d like to experiment with.
And it’s not capitalist work, it’s as anti-capitalist as it gets. You don’t even need to have a clear idea of what you’d like to be doing. You can tell us what you like to do (e.g. editing videos, doing stats work, managing a community) and we will probably be able to put our braincells collectively together to come up with something that uses that skill & would be beneficial for the project. Then you’re free to do that or not. There’s no deadlines or product to deliver. If it fails, it fails (though of course we’d rather it works). We don’t gatekeep people because they don’t have the right skills or diplomas, instead we work with them as facilitators so they can bring their project to the website.
The beauty of this project is that it’s a safe place to learn and perfect skills of all sorts (and also learning with comrades, because we learn together and not in isolation), which you can then apply in your hobbies, your organizational work, or at your job. There’s never any critical failure. We try stuff out and if it doesn’t work out, then we revert.
Most of the design theory I learned was from deploying features on ProleWiki and managing the editorial team (loosely speaking), and mostly through practice.
Of course as a collaborative encyclopedia the tradeoff is that you do work with other people and can’t do everything in isolation. We’re big on facilitation (it’s a real thing) instead of barking out orders. You may be a team leader for a project if you want to try and learn some organizational skills but we see them more as coordinators, basically the person who knows where everything is at at all times and can coordinate information to the right target. Idk just google facilitator they explain it on wikipedia lol.
We learn from practice and practice informs theory, and theory lets us do correct practice. It’s the perfect sandbox to practice in without too much commitment or chance of messing up. The other beauty of ProleWiki is that we have a large audience already (>1000 daily visits) and a team of more than 20 active editors. This means you don’t start from scratch and can quickly see the results of your work. This type of data is invaluable because it lets you know in 24 hours if your implementation was successful or not.
But if you want to test the waters you can comment here (or DM me if you’d like to keep it private) with ideas for stuff you’ve wanted to try and or learn and I can probably come up with some ways we could let you experiment with that on ProleWiki.
I could do some system admin type stuff if there’s help needed in that area. I’ve had a Linux homelab for the last four or so years as a hobby and brought some of those skills into my work over the last two years as well. I’ve done project management as well. In a corporate environment it’s definitely not my thing but I’d give it a try in a more collaborative space.
I would also like to write at some point but it’s never been a priority between everything else in life so I don’t get around to it.
We were looking recently at getting a cheap storage space, I think you even commented in that thread. Basically we want to move the image uploads to a bucket-type storage space because our VPS is getting full. We’d also want to move daily backups there – private backups for now, but eventually we’re looking at making public backups so that people could download ProleWiki locally.
Sysadmin is not really my area (I use GPT to code stuff when we need to bring a feature), so I’m not sure what exactly falls into or outside your area but anything to do with coding on MediaWiki is something we’re always looking for. The constraint is that since we run MediaWiki, everything has to be able to work with it, and not many people have experience with the software itself.
I know there’s an S3-compatible plugin for MediaWiki that should technically allow us to look at any S3 API solution and integrate it easily, but price is probably the main concern.
I have done a bit of programming. I’m not familiar with the MediaWiki backend but I’m happy to learn. I can basically do anything related to the hosting, backend, backups, storage, and small customizations.