Wikiversity:Wikidebate/Guy vandegrift
Why we need essays edit
As I was contemplating how to improve Wikiversity's page on socialism, I found myself pondering the pathological level of social discourse we see on venues like Facebook and Twitter. I fear we are entering a informational Dark Age, and that inspired the following essay:
It is not an essay about Wikidebates. It is ostensibly on the topic of socialism, but motivated by the idea that an excellent niche for Wikiversity might be to allow students at all levels to write essays. Even a flawed essay can be of educational value, especially to an author who goes back and reads what they wrote at a much later date.
Do we need dialogues? edit
Of course we do! It might turn out that dialogues need to be monitored, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Our first goal is to give folks something to do after they go through the structured Wikidebate.
Options edit
There has been recent discussion of this on the Colloquium (see Special:Permalink/2582498#Wikidebates_-_encouraging_people_to_debate_the_subject_on_the_talk_page.) Here is a tentative list of options, ranked by how much we wish to encourage students to contribute (beginning with the strongest possible invitation).
- Place an invitation to contribute essays into the template script used to construct all wikidebates. Place the essays in subspace to the wikidebate. Allow multiple essays by individual authors.
- Same as #1, but restrict essays to one per author. Label the essay by author username, but permit multiple authorship of single essay.
- Same as #2, but make the invitation an add-on to a wikidebate. Require the editor who adds the invitation volunteer to patrol the essays for quality.
- Place essays in draft space, perhaps using the debate's name. For example, "Are girls better than boys?" would have a top page called Draft:Are girls better than boys. My essay would be Draft:Are girls better than boys/Guy vandegrift. The top page, Draft:Are girls better than boys?, could be used for brief abstracts of each essay (with a strict character limit to keep the abstracts concise).
- Same as #3, except place the essays in the author's userspace.
- Use subpages to the talk page. Seems a bit contorted to me, but it is a compromise in that essays are associated with the talk page in a way that each author get's thier own page. My essay is at Wikiversity talk:Wikidebate/Essay by Guy vandegrift. A list of all essays could be stored at Wikiversity_talk:Wikidebate.
- Restrict debates to the talk page: Talk: Are girls better than boys talk? will host an arbitrary number of subpages, one for each contributing author. Example: Talk: Are girls better than boys talk?/Guy vandegrift
- This one is satire: Forbid (or discourage) the writing of essays on Wikiversity if the topic is covered by a wikidebate.
Conclusion edit
- My attempt to write an essay in talk space informs me that essay writing should not be attempted in talk space (see Wikiversity talk:Wikidebate/Essay by Guy vandegrift.)
- We could have students start their essays in draft space. One unintended consequence involves the moving of an essay from Draftspace to Namespace. Students will be tempted to move their essay to a top page in namespace. For example John Doe would write his essay in Draftspace and then move it to John Doe's take on Boys V Girls. For this reason, I do not recommend using draft space for wikidebate-based essays. I prefer Are boys better than girls?/Essays/John Doe.
- It might be nice to distinguish the high quality essays from those of low quality. This could be done at an index page called Are boys better than girls?/Essays. A teacher or interested quality WV editor could also allow users to contribute abstracts on this page.
- There is a simple way to address concerns about a hesitancy among active editors about hosting these essays: We begin with a single wikidebate, gradually increasing the number of essay-hosting debates as we learn. Since we already have three essays on the subject, the place to begin this experiment is at: Are wikidebates a good thing?