User:Dan Polansky/Policies and guidelines

There are categories for Wikiversity official policies and for guidelines:
 * Category:Wikiversity official policies -- e.g. WV:What is Wikiversity? and WV:Verifiability
 * Category:Wikiversity guidelines -- e.g. WV:Deletions and WV:Consensus
 * Category:Proposed policies (52 pages) -- e.g. WV:Blocking policy, WV:Ignore all rules, WV:Stubs (there is also WV:Stub), WV:Drafts

Some policy-like pages are outside of the above categories, e.g. WV:Scope and WV:Stub.

Original research
From policy What is Wikiversity?:
 * "Wikiversity is the place for original research, including primary or secondary research. This includes interpreting primary sources, forming ideas, or taking observations. Ethical guidelines must adhere, see Wikiversity:Research ethics. Pages with original research should be marked with the original research or research project templates. "

From policy Verifiability:
 * "Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments can be included at Wikiversity if verifiable sources are cited. Information on Wikiversity pages that is not supported by verifiable sources can be challenged and removed to talk pages for discussion."

More from policy Verifiability:
 * "The threshold for inclusion of information on Wikiversity pages is verifiability, not truth. Verifiable in this context means that any reader must be able to check that material added to Wikiversity pages has either:
 * already been published by a reliable source; or
 * has been produced by scholarly research performed at Wikiversity.

There is policy proposal (per category) Original research.

I see something of a contradiction. The Verifiability policy first seem to require citing "verifiable sources" (what does it mean? I understand reliable, solid, credible and peer-reviewed sources, but verifiable?), but then changes its mind and indicates that "scholarly research performed at Wikiversity" is one way of establishing that something is verifiable. Be it as it may, there is Template:Original research, which is used rather sparingly.

Traceability
I do not see Wikiversity policies trace to a discussion or a vote approving the policy or discussing possible shortcomings. By contrast, Wiktionary policies have gained some serious tracing to votes over the years, especially Wiktionary: WT:Criteria for Inclusion, which now traces to 41 votes.

Deletion
Deletion is captured in WV:Deletion guideline. It lists various reasons for deletion. Searches for "minimum", "minimal", "stub" and "substub" do not find anything. No requirement on minimum amount of material or the page being a minimum useful artifact seems to be found.

Templates for deletion are Template:Delete (for speedy deletion) and Template:Proposed deletion (for non-speedy deletion). There is also a forum for deletion, but when one uses Template:Proposed deletion, it seems that no creation of an entry in the forum is required [verify]. The template populates Category:Proposed deletions.

Test of a speedy deletion process: I tagged this: Example List of problems people are confronted with.

This revision of deletion discussion shows my attempt to have subpar pages deleted. Sustainability/Organic agriculture was kept, but Sustainability/Activities and Sustainability/Salt Lake were deleted. To limit later disruption, let me qoute Dave Braunschweig: "While I appreciate the efforts of both Dan Polansky and Omphalographer to improve Wikiversity, they also need to respect our longstanding Wikiversity culture. There is nothing about either of these pages that would or should lead to a deletion discussion [...]". Perhaps the point was not to bring this to explicit discussion to Requests for Deletion but rather merely tag it without listing it for discussion and let it be discussion-free-deleted (my term) after the given period for improvement elapses.

Drafts are a separate venue for deletion. Per Drafts, a draft not substantively edited over 180 days (ca. 6 months) can be deleted. As a result, the action of moving a page to the draft space is an implied request for deletion, even if deferred by 6 months. And yet, there does not seem to be much of a specification of when a page can be moved to "Draft" space; there is "Resources with little content, low quality, or addressing fringe theories are likely to be placed in the draft namespace until they are more fully developed." The "little content" language points to the substub idea. It is unclear what the "Draft" namespace achieve at all that cannot be achieved by tagging a page as "Substub" or the like. And if page is not a substub but rather a stub, it is not clear why it should be deleted (stubs are tolerated on Wikipedia). The substub terminology is perhaps mine, denoting something that does not reach the stub status in its being a minimal useful artifact. I don't like the idea of the draft space, but since it is here, we need to live with it. Page Draft:Index shows an incomplete automatically generated index of the Draft namespace; Search for regular expression dot in the Draft space finds over 600 pages.

Minimum content
As stated in section Deletion, there seem to be no specified requirements on minimum content in the policies and guidelines (or is this wrong?).

Example low-content pages, for which it is doubtful they should be kept:
 * Need in Category:Psychology stubs. But then, this may be taken as a disambiguation page rather than a learning resource
 * Theatre (two sentences of statement content), Theatre/Makeup and Theatre/Musical do not contain what I would think of minimum useful content
 * IBM in Category:Stubs. It has 1) no statement about IBM, 2) two trivial broad questions and 3) three external links.
 * Digestive system in Category:Stubs. Arguably, one learns nothing from the page, and the page does not even direct one to a list of resources (internal or external) from which one would learn about the digestive system.
 * Non-experimental design in Category:Stubs. There is no statement at all (not even to characterize the subject), a single See also to "Research design", and no further reading and no external links. Can hardly be more substubby/deletion-worthy.

What creates value in a Wikiversity page:
 * Set of (at least somewhat) original statements, analysis, deliberation, etc. And then, good further reading attached attached. I like to attach further reading also on section level rather than only on article/page level.
 * Specification of a subject together with a list of links to learn from, e.g. to Wikipedia but also elsewhere, where the list is reasonably complete.
 * Set of activities, that is, set of instructions guiding the reader step by step.
 * Something like an instruction book, e.g. PowerShell and Python Programming. This reminds of Wikibooks, but why not: it is original material and educational as well.
 * Lecture notes published as pdf generated from a presentation software, e.g. Haskell programming in plain view, pointing e.g. to Sudoku Background (0A).pdf. Not very wiki-like (no revision history of plain-text markup), but if it works for someone, why not.

Wikijournals
Here is an example of a wikijournal article: WikiJournal of Humanities/Rosetta Stone. Features:
 * The article has an author.
 * The text seems to be under control of the author?
 * Reviewers posted their comments on the article talk page.
 * The article looks pretty much like an encyclopedia article.
 * Before the article was accepted, it was a preprint located here: WikiJournal Preprints/Rosetta Stone.

Existing Wikijournals: WikiJournal of Humanities, WikiJournal of Medicine, WikiJournal of Science and WikiJournal of PPB (WikiJournal of Psychology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences).