User:Guy vandegrift/2024/What-goes-where

What-goes-where 2024 • Draft..Guy- • User..Guy- • Consensus • Slowdown

The numbers

 * All Wikiversities have a combined total of 38,612 or 3,861,200 articles with at least one internal link. Wikipedia's article on Wikiversity quotes 149,067 pages across all languages.
 * I estimate that there are 840 pages to be under Draft: (aka draftspace)
 * Of these, I estimate 30 to be under Draft:Archive (aka archivespace)
 * My effort to use a chatbot to count the number of pages in wikiversity namespace failed. A fun math problem would be to hit random until you see a page you saw before and use that to estimate the number of pages.
 * References
 * 1) https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikiversity/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm graphs for all wikipedias, all wikiversities, ect
 * 2) c:Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab like a table, but not a table (everything)
 * 3) Special:Statistics - w:Special:Statistics - b:Special:Statistics - wikt:Special:Statistics - simple:Special:Statistics

Two tables
The following tables compares the number of administrators to their workload in terms of number metrics. It is instructive to compare the workload metric per administrator. The following shows that Wikiversity editors have the lowest workload metric among the three wikis. That suggests that either Wikiversity has too many administrators, or that Wikiversity pages require more administrative attention. I believe it's the latter. Each Wikipedia articles has a well defined scope. In contrast, there are so many types of Wikiversity resources that it is impossible to even categorize them. It is almost as if the fact that everything is a learning experience, one can argue that everything belongs on Wikiversity.

Purging archive-space pages of category statements, etc.
I want Wikiversity to grow, which means I want the size of Draft-archive space to grow. There is a strong possibility that it will grow faster than maispace, and that could exert an undue effect on mainspace, especially in the use of category statements. It is very easy to purge these pages of such features, and equally easy for the reader to see the real real McCoy at the top of the history page. Currently all instances of  and   are being replaced by. And a statement explaining the purge is placed at the top of the page. It's a bit time consuming using the find/replace feature available to everybody using Source editing. We could speed up the purging with a simple Python (or other language) code to make the replacements and insert the explanation in the header.

Wikipedia's deletion policy
If we follow Wikipedia's deletion policy, the burden of proof lies with those who wish to delete a page. In the following quotations from Wikipedia and Wiktionary, the bold-face has been added in order to highlight this fact. I sourced these quotes with permalinks to preserve the exact wording as 19 March 2024. "These processes are not decided through a head count, so participants are each encouraged to explain their opinion and refer to policy. The discussion lasts at least seven full days; afterwards, pages are deleted by an administrator if there is consensus to do so."

That same page takes it one step further: Not only do you need a consensus, but you typically should have no doubt about said consensus:

"If in doubt as to whether there is consensus to delete a page, administrators normally will not delete it."

The hard part is deciding what a consensus is. Wiktionary gives us two definitions:

"A process of decision-making that seeks widespread agreement among group members ... (or) ... General agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision-making and follow-up action." While Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion about different forms of consensus, the lede states:

"Consensus usually refers to general agreement among the members of a group or community. It may also refer"

More thoughts good-faith efforts and whether we are in a position to judge their merits
This permalink to Wikiversity:Drafts stipulates that articles in draftspace be deleted after 180 days. Michael Ten recently proposed that we abandon that policy and allow pages to permanently reside in draftspace (see permalinks to the Colloquium and Wikiversity_talk:Drafts.)


 * Not deleting Creating Commons Content created in good faith is fruitful to the Creative Commons as a whole
 * Database storage is not reduced by deleting content
 * There is generally no harm keeping good faith content in the "Draft:" namespace.

Michael also pointed out that the scope of Wikiversity can be divided into three categories: (1) teaching, (2) learning and (3) research. Each category contains a diverse collection of resources: Some are designed to hone one's writing or wiki editing skills. Others are intended simply to plant the seed of an idea for others to later build upon.

Adding to this complexity is the fact that these three categories overlap. For example Book Reviews is a teaching resource because it contains a two-part essay o n how to write a book review. It is a learning resource as students can write and read each other's book reviews. Perhaps the most important book review for a student to read his/her own book review years after it was written. Ironically, the worse the original book report, the more is learned from the experience of re-reading it. By this metric, the reviews that we most want to keep on Wikiversity are the worst reviews!

The serious Wikiversarian is apt to see Book Reviews, not as a teaching or learning resource, but research into how enhance the outreach of Wikiversity to the community at large. The fact that this resource contains 25 book reviews is of that those seeking to enhance the value of Wikiversity might create similar resources. The recent creation of Movie Reviews was inspired by the success of Book Reviews.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that a decision is made to remove flawed student efforts after some period of time. We would still be faced with the daunting task evaluating the quality of these efforts: Even widely read (and refereed) scientific journals struggle with this. See, for example:


 * quora.com
 * The Guardian


 * qz.com
 * Wikipedia


 * springer.com
 * staxexchange


 * vox.com
 * news.mit.edu

Fine-tuning the stated reasons for deleting a page on Wikiversity

 * Deletions lists some of the reasons for deleting a Wikiversity page, and we need to be more precise regarding the first reason on that list. We need to distinguish between "no educational value" and "insufficient educational value". Almost everything has some educational value.
 * We need to include the number of pages in a project: One page of flawed material can be a learning experience if the student rewrites it. But I have seen several cases where the author either creates hundreds of pages, or is on track to before we intervene.

the rest is under construction

Thoughts

 * w:Wikipedia talk:Soft deletion (failed proposal)
 * w:Wikipedia:Redirect
 * w:Wikipedia:Deletion_process=WPSOFTDELETE
 * special:permalink/2614492

Wikipedia's deletion policy
If we follow Wikipedia's deletion policy, the burden of proof lies with those who wish to delete a page. In the following quotations from Wikipedia and Wiktionary, the bold-face has been added in order to highlight this fact. I sourced these quotes with permalinks to preserve the exact wording as 19 March 2024. "These processes are not decided through a head count, so participants are each encouraged to explain their opinion and refer to policy. The discussion lasts at least seven full days; afterwards, pages are deleted by an administrator if there is consensus to do so."

"If in doubt as to whether there is consensus to delete a page, administrators normally will not delete it."

The hard part is deciding what a consensus is. Wiktionary gives us two definition:

"A process of decision-making that seeks widespread agreement among group members ... (or) ... General agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision-making and follow-up action."

Is Wikiversity dying? ... Is Wikiversity evolving?
wp/wb=750 wb/wv=8->3 wv has trended over a range of 30% and is now not far from where it started. (See this |en.wikibooks.org|en.wikipedia.org 9 year range: You need to click the logarhytnm box in the upper right corner to see anything by Wikipedia. WikiJournals of Science and Medicine have also remained flat, except for occasional periods of dramatic interest in the WikiJournal of Science (See |WikiJournal_of_Science 7-year range)

Wikipedia is not a democracy

 * Google search
 * Scholarly article from Cornel (50 pages tldr)
 * w:special:Permalink/1210583621 has a link to Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee
 * w:Wikipedia:What "no_consensus" means states that if there is no consensus to delete, the the decision is to keep. (w:Special:Permalink/1187890095)
 * This opinion is reaffirmed at Wikipedia:Deletion process

What do we accomplish by deleting low-value pages?
The short answer is almost nothing, as a simple calculation will show: According to Special:Statistics, there are 226,351 pages in mainspace, with the vast majority being subpages. Let X be the fraction that need to be deleted. My guess is that X is in the neighborhood of of 10%, so X&approx;0.1, but we will see that the exact number is not important. With everyting else I do, I can't average more than 10 deletions per day (because as we saw above, I need to be careful.) That gets me 3,600 pages per year. The number of years it will take me to delete all the bad pages is 62.9X.

Keep in mind that if less than 1% of our pages need to be deleted, they are doing no harm. If more than 10% need to be deleted, we need a coordinated and dedicated crew, with a boss you don't talk back to. And our decisions need to be final (as well as correct.) I might be able to do 30 pages per day, but not 7 days a week. To justify a concerted effort to remove bad articles, we need for the fraction of bad pages to in the 3% range. Too many bad articles and we don't have the time to remove them, too few bad articles, and there is no need delete them. The reason universities are not using Wikiversity isn't that 3% or 10% of our pages are bad. It's that our best resources are not what the teacher is looking for. Even with a perfect wiki, a given teacher is looking among perhaps 1% of the available materials: Math teachers are not looking at Spanish books, and Spanish teachers don't want French or Italian. They are looking for a specific kind of book, at a specific level.

Template Wars (not really)
In a very friendly discussion, a variety of templates were put forth by User:Michael Ten and User:Guy vandegrift: It won't be difficult to select the right ones, but we need to wait for the community to make some decisions as to what-goes-where.

A: Template:Draftify

- B: Template:rfd rfd - C: Variation of Template:Draftify

- D: Variation of Template:Archive project