Talk:Comparative law and justice

Editing by non-students

I saw a claim in the "basic information" section in one of the project pages that I know isn't true, but before doing anything I wasn't supposed to I wanted to ask if they were free to edit for non-students when the course was still running. What's the policy on this? Ever wonder 17:30, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I've read Wikiversity:Learning_projects now and understand that you really "can't stop me". So, as I understand it there's a student (group of students?) who is/are responsible for the page and probably will be evaluated on it. I think because of this I still don't want to change it before I get a response here, or at least before I've waited for it a bit more. If I edit the page and that wasn't really planned for it might mess things up for whoever's doing the evaluation and it could be seen as unfair to those working on other pages. On the other hand, if I post on the talk page of that page, or on the creator's user talk or whatever (or if I change the content page and the evaluator thinks of looking there), it will be on record that the help of an outsider was "needed" which could be unfair to a person/group that could have found the mistake themselves. If you're actually doing evaluation based on these pages you've probably already thought of all this, but it would be nice to hear those thoughts explicitly. (Thoughts from students would also be welcome - what would you think of outsiders editing your pages?) Ever wonder 15:00, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I've done the change in question now, after having waited for an answer here for a while. I guess I have to assume you were aware that this would be part of having these pages on Wikiversity. Ever wonder 18:13, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I was also wondering about this. I've made some very minor edits that don't really change the content of the page. I think I saw on a policy page something about "ownership" of learning resources. I think that a person can request that certain pages only be edited by certain people and there is a template or infobox that informs viewers of this on the page. Found it. Template:Protected course. Some related reading: Wikiversity:Page protection templates and Wikiversity:Course protection policy. Although those are not official policy it shows that this issue is being discussed. Devourer09 (t·c) 20:01, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Project pages in mainspace at top level

Pages that were apparently created as part of this project have been created in mainspace. Properly, they should have been created as subpages, with subpage links, as are commonly used at Wikibooks. This has then interfered with the creation of pages as general articles or studies of the subject countries. I'll fix this. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:03, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

I have moved the unclassified ("2011") pages and those from Asia, North America, and South America, to project subspace; remaining to be done are the resources from Oceania, Europe, and Africa. The page on Singapore had been usurped, effectively, to beoome a resource on Singapore, which was a hazard from these resources being outside the project subspace. The resources should be reviewed for problematic changes. The main resource page will be edited for a more permanent presentation. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:41, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Europe moved except for France and Russia. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 05:07, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Africa and Oceania moved. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 05:23, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• completed moving all pages. Will edit index pages to use subspace addressing. Russia is not part of this project. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:24, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Naming issues and version conflicts

• We have Comparative law and justice/Bahamas and Comparative law and justice/The Bahamas. If I'm picking the name of a country from a list, I'll use the name without "The." The Bahamas is the later version, apparently by a different student.

• We also have Comparative law and justice/Switzerland and Comparative law and justice/Switzerland (later version).

• As well, Comparative law and justice/Rwanda (draft) and Comparative law and justice/Rwanda. The professor did not pay careful attention to what the students were doing. In at least thee cases, two different pages were created for the same country. In two of these, they were different students, apparently working in different terms.

• We need some structure to advise and guide users in creating projects. I remember when the CLJ project was running, and I was a custodian for part of that time. I think we assumed that a professor would know what from what. I did act, in at least one case, to push for usage of subspace. The professor was disconcerted. It all worked out, but .... If we had clear guidelines, it would be useful for everyone.

I think that many users come here from Wikipedia where subpages are not allowed in mainspace. Tragedy, that. Imagine an encyclopedia with everything on a separate page, with disconnected and unpredictable names. (Easy to imagine, because that's Wikipedia.) Yeah, you can organize it with categories, but ... subspace organization is easy. It's done at Wikibooks because chapters become subpages, and with subspace references, all the references remain valid if the top level page is moved by an administrator. (We don't allow ordinary users to make moves including subpages. I found out why, early on, as an administrator. Do *not* make any mistakes in a move involving hundreds of pages. The software doesn't support Undo of such mass moves. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:25, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I tend to disagree on the “unpredictability” of Wikipedia page names. (Why, I routinely use URIs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept without checking the existence of the page beforehand, and most of the time, if I fail to guess the “canonical” page name for the concept correctly, I’m just getting redirected. Not to mention that there’s often a whole world to discover just by keeping following the links.) As for the categories, while any given subpage may belong to at most one “parent” (as for any other hierarchical naming scheme), the number of categories it belongs to is essentially unlimited.

The good thing is that Wikiversity uses both subpages and categories. The former could be useful to organize the content around projects, while the latter tie it to the topics. (Which also makes me note that Wikipedia is a single project.)

It remains an open question for me, what’d be the best way to handle a situation where one project wants to reuse some other project’s page? Indeed, forking a copy is possible (although then, the community’d have to maintain two pages, which is not necessarily a good thing.) But what if the former project isn’t active at the time of a fork, will a move be sensible instead? And what if it becomes active sometime later? My guess is that there may be a better, more flexible approach to the issues like this, still waiting to be implemented by some lucky one.

(BTW, when it comes to moving hundreds of pages, whether doing or undoing, I guess relying on external software may be the solution.)

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 18:58, 21 January 2014 (UTC)