Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/November 2014

Newsletter edit

Hi all, here an update regarding the Dutch wikiversity. As you may or may not know, this year all 5000 pages on the Dutch wikiversity were removed. The people who removed the pages had another vision on what a wikiversity should be. After the removal it became quit again, no content creation. This month Wikimedia Nederland asked me to write about the Dutch wikiversity in there newsletter. What should I write about? My plan for 2015 is to find more people who want to join me in starting the Dutch wikiversity 2.0. How can I set up some guidelines to prevent a mass deletion again? I think I should find other people besides the Wikipedians who deleted the content, but unfortunately they are the only ones who are active? Can somebody help me? Give me some tips in how to establish a new community? Regards, Tim, Timboliu (discuss • contribs) 11:06, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Start with a mission and vision. But also recognize that you, by yourself, can't establish anything. It needs to be a community, and the community has to support the vision. Think about what works here on en.wikiversity. How do we avoid mass deletions of questionable content? Two approaches that help are to organize content by learning project rather than individual page, and to focus on the learning rather than the content. Ask those who are interested in Dutch Wikiversity for their ideas. Are they willing to focus on learning, or are they only concerned with content? You might find that the issue isn't the content itself, but the format that is troublesome. You may need to get everyone to agree on a design template for what a course, lesson, and activity look like and go from there. That would be highly proscriptive and somewhat restrictive, but it might get agreement from those who couldn't support the previous work. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:20, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Dave Braunschweig. The key strategy is to allow students to write. They are the future writers of Wikipedia (and everything else that will be written). Don't worry about quality control, just let them write. Then, if a page is neither visited nor edited for a sufficiently long period of time, remove it from namespace so that others will have good names for their projects. Don't worry about Wikiversity being cluttered with bad material. The good stuff will eventually be found by Google or through interwiki links. Teachers who find useful resources on Wikiversity can make permalinks so that they need not worry about misguided edits made in the future. Wikiversity, Wikibooks and Wiktionary will all grow. It just takes time.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 18:11, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm amazed that someone would bother to remove so much material and then not put something new in its place! But I can quite understand it. There is such a feeling, with Wikiversity, to get some structure in place before adding one's own material (at least, this has been my feeling from time to time with the English Wikiversity) that it's easy to never get to the real work. I rather suspect there's some parallel with traditional university procrastination here!

What was the quality of the deleted pages like? I assume mostly it was not very good?

But yes, those above have it right: the way forward surely is to succinctly define what Wikiversity actually is and then encourage people to write about whatever they're interested in! :-)

— Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 00:55, 6 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I just noticed that https://nl.wikiversity.org/ is not a wiki. Has it been closed completely? — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 06:20, 7 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Dutch Wikiversity is at https://beta.wikiversity.org. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:34, 7 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the advice. Cheers, Tim, 77.171.140.130 (discuss) 21:38, 7 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see. :) Cool. I'll have a read of what's going on over there. I've never really noticed Beta Wikiversity much. :) — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 05:07, 10 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

New request for custodianship edit

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Candidates_for_Custodianship/Goldenburg111

Just like to inform you. --Golden_burg111 16:37, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't this page violate our Wikiversity:Privacy policy? edit

The <hidden> userpage shows:

1. Her full name 2. Her birthdate 3. Ancestry 4. Religion 5. Father, date of birth and place of birth. 6. Mother, date of birth and place of birth. 7. Residence.

I say this violates the privacy policy, as I said, she revealed her full name, her birthdate, ancestry, father (date of birth and place of birth), mother (date of birth and place of birth), and residence. --Golden_burg111 14:55, 13 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the page you noted appears to be a violation of Wikiversity:Privacy policy. But be careful, as drawing attention to it is more likely to cause a violation of that person's privacy than the page itself does. I have hidden the page link here, and will hide your revision to protect the privacy of this minor user. If you find more privacy violations like this, it would be better to use the Email this user feature to contact a custodian for review. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:06, 13 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, thank you. --Golden_burg111 15:57, 13 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Global AbuseFilter edit

Hello,

AbuseFilter is a MediaWiki extension used to detect likely abusive behavior patterns, like pattern vandalism and spam. In 2013, Global AbuseFilters were enabled on a limited set of wikis including Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Wikispecies and (in early 2014) all the "small wikis". Recently, global abuse filters were enabled on "medium sized wikis" as well. These filters are currently managed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and have shown to be very effective in preventing mass spam attacks across Wikimedia projects. However, there is currently no policy on how the global AbuseFilters will be managed although there are proposals. There is an ongoing request for comment on policy governing the use of the global AbuseFilters. In the meantime, specific wikis can opt out of using the global AbuseFilter. These wikis can simply add a request to this list on Meta-Wiki. More details can be found on this page at Meta-Wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on m:Talk:Global AbuseFilter.

Thanks,

PiRSquared17, Glaisher

— 17:34, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Top 1000 Requests By Month edit

I automated a process to download page request statistics from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/. I've posted monthly totals for the top 1000 articles from the last three months at:

Those looking for a place to help and wondering where their efforts would have the greatest impact should focus on the projects and pages in highest demand.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:43, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am puzzled that Torque_and_angular_acceleration got so many hits. We almost deleted that article about a month ago. See the discussion at Wikiversity:Colloquium#Wikipedia_copies --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 23:48, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible for a single individual to mess with page counts. Just hitting purge on a page forces it to refresh. There are also some pages on the list that are clearly influenced by a bot driving up the counts. But overall, it makes more sense to focus on pages on the list before working on some random project that may never be viewed. I did notice that there are a number of mechanics / physics pages that might go together well as a learning project. It's out of my area of expertise, but something to consider. I'm also working on a list of the top 100 learning projects (adding up subpage counts to get a total per project). I'll post when I have something useful to share. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:53, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was fascinating to see how much is being done in fields closely related to mine. I was planning to strengthen the electronics sections of Physics equations, but now realize that I should instead let others do the work for me.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 00:18, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind that this shows page hits or views, not edits. I have several projects on the list that never see an edit from anyone else. They're popular, but they don't draw updates. I keep telling myself it's because the quality is so good that they don't need updates. :-) I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it sounds good. If you have something high on the list, you should work on it anyway, or make it very clear to visitors that they can update and improve. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:46, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello forum members edit

I'm new to greet you need in August. Sorry for my english

Welcome! --Golden_burg111 01:13, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor coming to this wiki as a Beta Feature edit

Hello. Please excuse the English. I would be grateful if you translated this message!

VisualEditor, a rich-text editor for MediaWiki, will soon be available on this wiki as a Beta Feature. The estimated date of activation is Wednesday, 26 November.

To access it, you will need to visit the Beta features page after the deployment and tick the box next to "⧼Visualeditor-preference-core-label⧽". (If you have enabled the "Automatically enable most beta features" option, VisualEditor will be automatically available for you.) There will also be a "⧼Visualeditor-preference-language-label⧽" that you can enable if you need it.

Then, you just have to click on "Edit" to start VisualEditor, or on "Edit source" to edit using wikitext markup. You can even begin to edit pages with VisualEditor and then switch to the wikitext editor simply by clicking on its tab at any point, and you can keep your changes when doing so.

A guide was just published at mediawiki.org so that you can learn how to support your community with this transition: please read and translate it if you can! You will find all the information about the next steps there. Please report any suggestions or issues at the main feedback page. You will also receive the next issues of the multilingual monthly newsletter here on this page: if you want it delivered elsewhere, for example at your personal talk page, please add the relevant page here.

Thanks for your attention and happy editing, Elitre (WMF) 18:12, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor coming to this wiki as a Beta Feature (errata) edit

Please notice the correct direct link to access Beta features is this one. Thanks for your understanding! Elitre (WMF) 18:35, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Colloquium image edit

A while back we were considering replacing the colloquium image with something a bit more universal and perhaps appropriate. May I suggest the following image, which may need some cropping of the ceiling:

This may be an open conference on a colloquium subject. Credit: Leighblackall.

Where are the kids in the pic? or <SOME COLOR>-colored people? (not that the current one has it either ;-)) ----Erkan Yilmaz 09:55, 24 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Two good points! At least it has men and women, improvement number one. There is an Asian Indian or Pakistani center back I believe, and an oriental on the right. I'll keep looking. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 16:19, 24 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]