Wikiversity:The newbie experience

Welcome to The Newbie Experience, a content development project in the spirit of Wikiversity:Introduction Overhaul Taskforce.

Introduction

While this project shares some of its goals with Wikiversity:Introduction Overhaul Taskforce, this project page is in the Topic namespace where Wikiversity content development projects normally exist. This content development project attempts to chart the problems encountered by new visitors to Wikiversity and use that information to make sure that there are good learning resources available to help new Wikiversity visitors become familiar with wiki in general and Wikiversity in particular.

Case studies

These case studies are reports by new visitors or experienced Wikiversity participants pretending to be new visitors.

User:Clueless

This is a new account for User:JWSchmidt.

Links from sister projects

Under the link to Wikiversity from the Wikipedia Main Page it says, "Free learning materials and activities". There has been a long-standing complaint about the name "wikiversity": the name might suggest to people that the Wikiversity project is an online university or otherwise biased towards college-level learning resources and biased against learning resources for pre-college students. The motto contest is trying to identify an "official" phrase to be used at links to Wikiversity from Wikimedia sister projects. The most popular choice is apparently "open learning community", but maybe if that becomes the motto then a different description should be used near sister project links to make the point that Wikiversity is for all ages. Too long. I think "Free learning materials and activities" (38 characters) is the longest "description" under any of the links to sister projects. It could be shortened to "Learning resources for all ages" (31 characters), closer in length to the second longest "Wikimedia project coordination" (30 Characters).

• open learning community for all ages (36 characters)
• open learning for all ages (26 characters)
• mentioned at the Colloquium

Account creation

The page for account creation should link to Wikiversity:Why create an account (MediaWiki:Prefs-help-email was edited, but that might not be the best placement of the link).

Main Page

Create a flashy box for Wikiversity talk:Main Page to link to Wikiversity:Main page design changes and then archive old talk on that page.

Many visitors to the Wikiversity Main Page are new to wiki and need help to understand what is going on at Wikiversity. Should the main page be a better learning resource for these new visitors? Discuss at Main page design changes.

Glossary

One of the easiest things to forget is the large amount of specialized jargon used by editors of Wikimedia Foundation wiki projects. How can Wikiversity:Glossary be made a useful learning resource? The glossary is now linked to from Template:Opentask and Introduction to Wikiversity; maybe there should be a page linked to from Wikiversity:Maintenance such as Wikiversity jargon, a learning project to get help with jargon and build the glossary.