Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/August 2020

Human behaviour edit

--2402:3A80:B71:3D40:0:47:C6B9:F701 (discuss) 21:16, 2 August 2020 (UTC)hello,my name is Vishal singh,I am from India. My question is,I see many peoples who describes human behaviour in different ways sometimes it's very irritating.the most common thing is when a youngster searching for motive but they confused and frustrated much during in unemployment they doubt himself.i was searching many years before the YouTube is worst thing who distracted people's in the name sacred phycology of human behaviour is compared to how to impress girl or how to read minds I knew that is just money earnings methods of fullish people's.but the main question is if I say where the roots grown from the minds,how a mind of a human agreed to existence of those things like vision or dreams if they are so how you believe them they are true.[reply]

Technical Wishes: FileExporter and FileImporter become default features on all Wikis edit

Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

CC by 4.0 for uploaded files edit

Not sure if something has changed, but in uploading files recently, I noticed there was no CC by 4.0 option in the upload form - only CC by SA and GFDL. Looks like some previous discussion here: Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/September_2018#CC-BY_4.0_as_default_license_in_upload_forms. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 11:53, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Jtneill: It looks like CC-BY 3.0 was removed in January 2018. I've added CC-BY 4.0 to MediaWiki:Licenses. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 14:25, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Dave Braunschweig: You're amazing - what would we do without you? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 23:27, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Supporting robust, portable flash card data sets edit

One of the most useful resource sets we could provide specifically for foreign-language courses would be structured vocabulary data, tied to lessons, that could be easily exported from Wikiversity into platform-independent, open-source flash card software like Anki.

I've looked at the box-based flash cards that are being used on other projects around the site, and while they seem good enough for a few flashcards at the end of a chapter, they are not going to work for language learning, where you really want the kind of advanced features you get in dedicated flash card apps--not to mention the convenience of having an app on your phone rather than having to open Wikiversity several times a day for spaced repetition study.

Especially since there are some great open source apps out there already, it seems like the best solution is to give our users structured data to download and import into Anki or a similar app. I'm a comfortable wiki editor and have written my share of code for other purposes, but I've only created a few simple Lua scripts, and I don't know much about the MediaWiki software's innards.

My questions are:

1. I started by trying to create structured data on a sandbox page in the Data namespace here on Wikiversity, following the instructions in mediawikiwiki:Help:Tabular Data, but, unless I've fouled up somewhere, this kind of data parsing seems MediaWiki-specific. Is there any way to create that sort of structured data (not just a display table) here?

2. If not, is there any policy or technical reason why we couldn't keep vocabulary lists in tabular format on MediaWiki and use local Lua scripts to access and process that data?--e.g., can Lua take input from an interwiki link?

3. Is there any way to generate a text file download from a wiki page on-the-fly? For example, a button or link where the user can click to save a CSV/TSV file for importing into Anki? Anything a little more user-friendly than "Here's a CODE block, copy and paste it into a text editor"?

4. Are there any other flash card/vocabulary list projects that are underway/abandoned that I should look at instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

--Chapka (discusscontribs) 19:17, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Chapka: We don't have a Data: namespace. See Wikiversity:Namespaces. That seems to be something specific to Commons:. It might also be replaced now by Wikidata. MediaWiki is for the software itself. Either Commons or Wikidata would be what you want. I suspect Wikidata is the way to go now. What I don't know is how you would manage user data, such as tracking which items a user has already seen, how long it took them to answer, etc. That might require JavaScript-specific client-side data. I'm not familiar with Anki, but I haven't seen any way to save text files. .txt is not a supported file format for uploads. There was a quiz project that was abandoned. Search phabricator: to see if there's anything useful on flashcards or quizzes. Another option would be something like Openwords. I don't know anything about it, but it comes up as the first option for open source language software. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 00:34, 17 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tab doesn't change color when selected... edit

Portal:Irish/Cultural_Studies

When the other two tabs in the group are selected the background color changes to match the background of the tab.. This doesn't happen for the third tab , Why? ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 23:52, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ShakespeareFan00: I can confirm that it doesn't work for me, either. I looked at it, but I don't see anything wrong with the page. Not sure what else to try, other than perhaps making a sandbox and seeing if you can replicate it or correct it in a different portal. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 17:48, 17 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unclosed paragraph... edit

WikiJournal_of_Science/Widgiemoolthalite and others, I've been through the various templates and still can't figue out WHY this has an unclosed paragraph.

Short of reverting the entirity of my cleanup efforts over the last few years entirely, it needs someone else (with more expertise when it comes to templates) to finally figure out why the set of overly complicate nested templates, this uses are misrendering.

Perhaps next time other Wikversity Contributors will consider actually writing UNDERSTANDABLE and DOCUMENTED template code, so that those contributors trying to maintain things aren't having to run around in circles trying to figure out precisely which single character or white space change they made, in some seemingly unrelated template or page edit caused misrenders or generated malformed HTML in the first place?

ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 17:58, 18 August 2020 (UTC) [reply]

I need to take a break... As is typically the case the fault condition was buried inside a called template's parser function. Still not obvious to a normal contributor, unless they knew to look for that situation specifically. ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 23:37, 18 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ShakespeareFan00: Thank you so much for this. I realise the templates have become pretty nested to avoid having too much complexity within the template itself. But I realise it ends up making it harder to check and contribute to. One thing that might be possible is I could start hiving off the formatting to a /styles.css subpage (the same way that w:Template:Intro_to) so that the actual template content is easier to read, but that cause its own editability barrier. Their complexity has been raised previously as a problem, though formatting the right-hand panel of {{article_info_main}} as an infobox ({{Article_infobox}}) still is quite complex at the source code level. A lot of that code complexity should hopefully be simplified once basic data is being straight imported from wikidata (example of a 'get authors' command that would negate the need for all the parts dealing with listing a variable number of |firstn and |lastn parameters). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:20, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Evolution and evolvability: The other suggestion, I would make is that a complex template like this might be candidate for a LUA support module or conversion to a LUA module, which has both advantages and disadvantages in terms of maintainability. LUA code is to some extent able to re process it's input data in ways that are less cumbersome than with conventional template markup, and to some extent code be if needed more dynamic. ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 08:27, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Broken, beyond reasonable attempts to figure out WHY it's misrendering. Can someone please come up with an explanation or I will propose it's removed on the grounds of being unmaintainable. Perhaps next time, Wikiversity Contributors can write SIMPLE and DOCUMENTED templates that NORMAL contributors can actually understand in order to keep them maintained ? ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 19:36, 18 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As it typically is, it turns out the cause of the misrendering was deeply buried 2 levels down in an embedded template. But still not obvious to a normal contributor as to where to look for the fault. ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 23:36, 18 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Two Broken Portals... edit

Sorry for the drastic approach, but I've proposed the following for speedy as broken and unmaintained Portal pages.

Should there be someone that actually cares enough to retain these, fixing them would be preferable, but there seems to be a lack of interest in getting some parts of Wikiversity back to an acceptable standard.

If there isn't the time of inclination to fix things, then broken portals should be removed, to prevent the site looking bad and amateurish. ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 21:02, 18 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I support the idea, but let's give it some time to see if anyone wants to fix these vs. delete them. We typically use {{proposed deletion}} (as {{subst:prod}}) in these situations. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 01:36, 19 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agree -- Jtneill - Talk - c 01:55, 19 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Template simplification? edit

I recently "repaired" this, but I am thinking it could be simpler.

Template:Workshop for Australian education policy

Any suggestions? ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 10:32, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

My preference is for navigation sidebars, and they should be subpages, not templates. See, for example, IT Fundamentals/Sidebar. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 13:25, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lint removal. edit

Okay so I am taking a short pause..

It would be nice if someone could review the 'fixes' I've made to ensure nothing serious broke in the process. Thanks ShakespeareFan00 (discusscontribs) 19:05, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ShakespeareFan00: I've reviewed a few edits along the way. Everything seemed good from my perspective. Please continue when you're refreshed. Thanks! -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 19:52, 20 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st edit

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:49, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Free Learning List edit

https://freelearninglist.org/Justin (koavf)TCM 19:15, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]