Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/January 2020

Wikidata integration and en.wp linking

I've been thinking about posting this for a few weeks and went back and forth until I saw today that YouTube is considered a high-quality learning resource. I went to check and sure enough, the link at the bottom of w:en:YouTube#External_links was added by me and the relevant Wikidata item did not have a link until I added it just now. It's valuable that we are deliberate about adding links to our sister projects for visibility and I think it's especially important to do so with our higher-quality resources. Am I on the right track here? Does anyone else have an interest in working withe me on this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:50, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

I'd recommend focusing on a combination of high-quality, high-interest resources. Perhaps start at the top of Wikiversity:Statistics/2019 and review for quality. Where appropriate, add Wikidata and Wikipedia links. I have interest, but not much time right now. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:21, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

I've added WikiData links to all of my resources for years. For resources in general I use {{Sisterprojectsearch|}} or {{Sisterlinks|}}. I agree that it is also important to add these to additional resources here and noticed that User:Koavf added the WikiData link to YouTube, thanks! Generally, I've noticed that few of our resources have sister links especially to WikiData. Perhaps these can be added by a bot. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 06:09, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

It's fairly trivial to do a search on Wikidata for articles that have the same title as all of the titles here on this project. Since there are so few resources compared to the 6 million articles on en.wp, that wouldn't be terribly time-consuming. Of course, many resources are not going to have some one-to-one correspondence to en.wp but anything with the most basic name (e.g. Spanish) will. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:18, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

I strongly oppose a bot making these decisions and in any case the bot would need to be authorized on WP. I doubt you will find consensus there to such a task. (I would !vote to oppose it) As I've explained below we should focus our community efforts on quality over quantity. The latter has been severely neglected in past efforts. --mikeu ^talk 15:44, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Did anyone propose a bot? I appreciate you removing extraneous and essentially misleading links but we should retain proper links even if our resource here an en.wv is pretty poor for data integrity purposes. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:45, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, a bot was proposed. And no, I agree with Mu301 that we should not have links to poor resources. Perhaps we should even Draft: the poor resources, but we certainly don't want to encourage Wikiversity being known for poor quality. If you believe that linking is necessary, that would accelerate my interest in pushing poor quality resources into Draft space. We do have a standing policy not to link to drafts. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:32, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

We should not choose to include or exclude Wikidata links because of quality. If we feel that a certain threshold is not met to be in the main namespace, then we should draftify or userfy. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:44, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Please have a look at my notice at Wikiversity:Notices_for_custodians/Archive/5#cross_wiki_disruption and the contribs.

Nobody60 (talk • email • contribs • stats • logs • global account) This participant's egregious self promotion of personal essays is the consequence of our negligence in curating the quality of wp links to resources here. Yes, we should be reviewing quality and culling those attempts. If draft or user moves are required I would accept that as an alternative. These are not AGF attempts at providing useful information to learners. This is spam and vandalism. --mikeu ^talk 00:07, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I've made some effort to curate the existing links there, see my blog post for a summary. I discovered quite a few article that had broken redlinks or pages that had been moved to draft space.[1] Ensuring quality works both ways: choose to link to our best featured projects, and also be vigilant about removing overzealous linking back here.

Currently, I see links to Arabic and Ada which are poorly developed local stubs. Historically there was an effort by participants here to "drive traffic" to new resources. IMO, this is misguided and counter productive. Despite a lengthy period of time with those links existing it resulted in no development of the local resources. I just removed a link from w:Drum to Category:Drums for example. I see little sense in linking w:Idempotence to Portal:Computer Science which doesn't even mention the word. Even more problematic are w:World peace linking to a personal essay Happiness/A World of Peace, Love and Happiness. (<- there were multiple examples of spamming to related essays) Then there's w:Refrigeration linking to an abandoned survivalist Underground refrigerated storage room resource. I just removed a half dozen such links. --mikeu ^talk 15:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore

Hello Folks,

Wiki Loves Love is back again in 2020 iteration as Wiki Loves Folklore from 1 February, 2020 - 29 February, 2020. Join us to celebrate the local cultural heritage of your region with the theme of folklore in the international photography contest at Wikimedia Commons. Images, videos and audios representing different forms of folk cultures and new forms of heritage that haven’t otherwise been documented so far are welcome submissions in Wiki Loves Folklore. Learn more about the contest at Meta-Wiki and Commons.

Kind regards,
Wiki Loves Folklore International Team
— Tulsi Bhagat ({{font|color=black|contribs} } | talk)
sent using MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 06:14, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

LinkedIn

This refers to the discussion mentions here: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity_talk:Main_Page#LinkedIn

I think that a Wikiversity page should be added on LinkedIn. Please vote for support or lack thereof.

Discussion

From [2]:

Wikimedia has its LinkedIn page; Wikipedia, too. But not Wikiversity. I tried to show my Swedish studies but could not choose Wikiversity as the Institution. Why not? Even when it is not a "granting degree" institution, is is still an Institution, right? When I contacted LinkedIn about this, they sent me the link so that I can create myself the Wikiversity page. But then there is box I must tick: " I confirm I am an approved authority of this Institution to create this page", which is not the case. But I think there are many Wikiversity experts on here that woud qualify as Wikiversity Linkedin page creators. I can create the page if someone here approves, but I would need some info: # of employees, etc.

The number of employees (volunteers is not an option but we are unpaid) for our Wikiversity I guess could be the number of active users 201-500. The current logo is File:Wikiversity logo 2017.svg. The website can be https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page.

Wikiversity is a community. None of us gets to insist that anything happen on behalf of the community unless there is consensus to do so. Because this request involves an outside organization, it may also require support from the WMF.

--Leonardo T. Cardillo (discuss • contribs) 16:23, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose Looking at your request at Wikiversity:Help desk it seems that what you are trying to do is list Wikiversity as an educational institution that you have attended which is not quite the same thing as a "company" profile page on that site. Because Wikiversity is not a degree granting institution and has no formal enrollment requirements it wouldn't qualify as a school as defined by LinkedIn. Creating a company page is problematic as we would need to have volunteers to maintain the page and keep it up-to-date. We tried creating @Wikiversity on Twitter and it was not much used so it was abandoned many years ago. I see that there's a Wikipedia Users Group that barely gets one or two posts per year despite Wikipedia having a much larger base of participants. There is also a Wikipedia company page that appears to be managed by staff who are paid to promote the site. I can't see a compelling reason to create a Wikiversity presence on LinkedIn. I would also note that you can add a "project" to your profile that links to Wikiversity. That would seem to be the best solution to what you are looking for. I don't support creation of a LinkedIn page at this time. --mikeu ^talk 17:06, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose per Mu301. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:51, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose, per above. —Hasley 20:55, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Movement Learning and Leadership Development Project

Hello

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Development team is seeking to learn more about the way volunteers learn and develop into the many different roles that exist in the movement. Our goal is to build a movement informed framework that provides shared clarity and outlines accessible pathways on how to grow and develop skills within the movement. To this end, we are looking to speak with you, our community to learn about your journey as a Wikimedia volunteer. Whether you joined yesterday or have been here from the very start, we want to hear about the many ways volunteers join and contribute to our movement.

To learn more about the project, please visit the Meta page. If you are interested in participating in the project, please complete this simple Google form. Although we may not be able to speak to everyone who expresses interest, we encourage you to complete this short form if you are interested in participating!

-- LMiranda (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I just filled out the survey. I think that it would be great if Wikiversity had a presence in this project. --mikeu ^talk 23:46, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Open call for Project Grants

Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals until Feburary 20 to fund both experimental and proven projects such as research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), or providing other support for community building for Wikimedia projects.

We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:

• Program guidelines and criteria
• Tutorials for writing a strong application
• General planning page for Project Grants
• Scheduled proposal clinics to discuss your proposal and ask questions

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Outage

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T243713

Wikiversity and many other Wikimedia projects have been experiencing widespread server trouble. There are reports of slowness or timeouts from Europe and North America. I haven't seen any indication about why this happened. The en-wp twitter account @Wikipedia has confirmed the problems. The situation seems to be improving now. --mikeu ^talk 21:32, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Tracked in phab:T243713. —Hasley 23:16, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Phylogenetic tree nested templates and expansion depth limits

A phylogenetic tree in this article is causing expansion depth to be exceeded by nested templates. Is there a way to raise the recursion level for a specific page? Any ideas appreciated. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 00:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: See Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Avoiding MediaWiki expansion depth limit. I am not aware of any way to alter expansion depth settings. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

First, I would argue that you shouldn't even try to raise these limits. If you are encountering problems like this - you're doing it wrong. Creating wiki pages that stress the mediawiki software increases the likelihood that you're going to encounter other negative outcomes like rendering pages that break mobile compatibility or cause excessive load on our servers.

Second, I see that the tree on the wp version of the page works fine w/o throwing an error. What's the difference here? There might be a local template which differs from the wp version in an important way. I would look into that.

I'm highly critical of the overly complex design of the wikijournal pages. Sure, it looks nice. But the depth of transclusion results in an experienced editor such as myself, who only casually edits these pages, having great difficulty in figuring out which subpage I need to click edit on to load the text that I want to change. This is very user unfriendly and the combination of the outer format complexity with the inner template expansion could be part of the problem here.

I approach wikis with a unusually minimalist philosophy where I rarely include any "fancy" formatting. I appreciate the desire to create a design that is more appealing. I realize that my approach is not suited to everyone's taste. But you should understand that there are consequences for implementing complex design formatting. It might results in rendering errors like you're seeing here or it might discourage participation from those who aren't experienced in wiki editing. I'd suggest that you give some thought to this cost/benefit analysis.

See Wikiversity:Mobile usability for more about this. I just checked and the wp page renders fine on a iPhone simulator. The addition of the wikjournal boilerplate makes the page here difficult to navigate and read at the top, though most of the body of the article looks fine. Please also have a look at the ~200 CSS/HTML errors this page throws due to excessive style markup.[3] The developers created a system for rendering pages on a wide variety of devices based on the assumption that page content uses standard wiki practices for formatting. The automatic conversion from desktop to mobile version might ignore, or worse, incorrectly interpret the style that you've designed. --mikeu ^talk 17:50, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, in this case it the phylogeny issue appears to be independent of any of the other templates in the page, since it also mis-formats on a page on its own. Must be related to the {{clade}} template. I'll try re-importing the clade template from Wikipedia to see if that fixes it (without breaking any of the other instances). Otherwise, a bodge will be to trim the phylogeny back a node or two.

Re Wikijournal pages in general: Several WikiJournal formatting templates should be replaceable with altered MediaWiki:Common.css items (e.g. {{fig}} and {{WikiJournal h2}}) so that standard ==heading_2== and [[File:name|thumb|caption]] can be used. Implementing that is still just beyond my abilities, but I'll work on it (unless anyone else has experience in that area). For the general instructional and descriptive pages, some simplification may be possible. Often the same text needs to be transcluded to multiple locations (e.g. /Editorial_guidelines). However I can endeavour to make sure that the source page for that contet is always WikiJournal_User_Group/XYZ and endeavour to make sure those pages are as easy to edit as possible. For article and review pages, the priority is probably VisualEditor-compatibility, since those contributors are most likely to be first-time users. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 23:42, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

A re-import of {{clade}} from en.wikipedia seems to have fixed the issue (the existing uses of the templates, e.g. Animals, also still all work after purging). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 23:50, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm not very knowledgeable about advanced template coding so I don't feel qualified to help out with this. But checking on your sandbox the tree looked ok. Did you recently change a template?

I find trancslusion to be very helpful. I'm not discouraging use of these tools; just be aware that it can sometimes cause undesirable side effects. This colloquium page throws over 100 html validity errors, but most are not serious. The wikijournals throw double that number which could cause problems for some readers. Just something to be aware of. My employer requires that I review web and social media posts to ensure ADA compliance for text to speech synthesis, etc. So I'm in the habit of proof reading web sites on multiple platforms to make sure that it works well for everybody. I consider this a worthwhile goal even though it is sometimes not needed. --mikeu ^talk 00:54, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that validator.w3.org checking site was extremely useful. I'm going to add a background task to go through and see which ones I'm able to fix over the course of this year. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 09:42, 31 January 2020 (UTC)