User talk:BDolge

 Hello and Welcome to Wikiversity BDolge! You can contact us with questions at the colloquium or me personally when you need help. Please remember to sign and date your finished comments when participating in discussions. The signature icon above the edit window makes it simple. All users are expected to abide by our Privacy, Civility, and the Terms of Use policies while at Wikiversity.

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You do not need to be an educator to edit. You only need to be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage. See you around Wikiversity! --The Gir’s and Sing 21:04, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Your user names
I see you apparently are User:BDolge and User:Bdolge7794. This may have caused some confusion. I assume you will prefer the simpler name. Would you like some assistance cleaning this up? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:13, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure, I created BDolge7794as a demo for a class and just never got around to figuring out how to get rid of it. What should I do?
 * First of all, log in and sign your comments! However, do you have the password for that account still? If so, log in as Bdolge7794 and place, on the user page,:

This was a test account, I am User:BDolge. --~
 * Then log out and log in as BDolge, and add:

Confirmed. --~
 * You will have now demonstrated that you are both users.
 * If you don't have the password, and if you didn't set up email to receive password recovery, you will simply do this as BDolge. Nobody is going to object.
 * I see that the Bdolge7794 account was used extensively in February - March 2013. That user page has extensive data on it, placed there by many users.

Project organization
At some point it might be useful to discuss procedures for class participation. Various instructors handle the matter very differently, and can make it difficult to maintain the project. For example, as someone involved in site maintenance, most edits to a user page not from the user are vandalism. So those edits create distraction for us. I'd suggest setting up class pages, as subpages of the resource being created or of an HCC activity page. Those subpages would be unique to a particular session and section. They might be under Howard Community College

I'm a bit uncomfortable with the sprawl of projects created in mainspace at the top level. There is a move away from that and toward resources organized hierarchically. I'm not sure how many HCC instructors are involved, but we might think about how to organize these. You have used categories to keep pages linked, but there are limitations to that. If a page is, for example, removed from a category, there is no easy way to find that.

Rather, I'm thinking along the lines of having a resource, that is Engineering projects or General Engineering Projects (is "General" necessary in the name?), that might have subpages categorizing the projects, if that's necessary, or just a list of projects. The General Engineering Projects page is something like an essay or proposal by 1sfoerster, and the thinking is brick-and-mortar. (Nothing wrong with that, but I'm looking at improving the integration with long-term Wikiversity content). So there might be resources, Engineering projects/Electronics/Music interface or Engineering projects/Art/Escher. So, long term, Engineering projects becomes a resource with very many example projects. (And they don't need to be limited to HCC.)

Long term, we don't need to have categories like General Engineering Projects 2010-2012. (If General is an important part of the name, in actual usage, then it would stay in those names, if not, "Engineering" with no further specification is general in implication already. And longer names are cumbersome.)

Howard Community College would have subpages documenting the history, i.e., links to projects organized by date, i.e., by term. These may also list the instructor and the student roster and assignment of students to specific projects. Because these pages will describe the term when created, they do not need to be changed later. The only thing that changes is that an "Active project" category is placed on currently active projects. That is easily and quickly removed after the term is over.

I will ping User:1sfoerster. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:28, 24 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks Abd. Any attention you give us improves things.
 * "Most edits to a user page not from the user are vandalism" .. students are editing instructor user pages and instructors are editing student user pages .. this was to solve the problem of unleashing 50 to 100 students twice a year into wikimedia .. trying to confine them to a sandbox .. sandboxes are on user pages .. the problem is getting them setup .. so they can learn wikimedia first by editing and don't have to create resources .. which is where most of the problems occur .. this is why I asked Dave Branschweig about automating the set up of students.
 * General engineering is ... there is a joke, there are two types of engineers .. Some engineers keep learning more and more about everything until they know nothing, other engineers dig deep narrow holes, chasing one thing into more and more narrow detail until they know nothing. General engineering is about the former. Wikiversity engineering organization doesn't separate these two vectors very clearly. Engineers need to be conscious about this boundary and dance around it.
 * I would be happy to start over .. on an Engineering Projects resource page like you proposed and improve upon the "Brick and Mortar."
 * General Engineering Projects 2010-2012 are the projects that I am trying to migrate away from. I am trying to take them down, but am having problems with deleting edit history, redirect chains and potential loops. Any help you can give me there would be appreciated.
 * Organizing through subpages to Engineering projects won't work because these are general projects .. they are all art, they are all electronics, they are all mechanical .. The Category tool fits perfectly. The projects themselves overlap. Parts of one project are used in another. I am struggling with how to fit this into Wikiversity. Sort of a project disambiguation page?
 * Removing the history, place, chronology, people, and institutions from these projects has been very beneficial to the quality of the documentation. In the last year we have started to migrate away from anything that has "Howard community college" on it. Our goal now is to eliminate such references.
 * So the problem that surfaces is how to deal with two "wireless power projects" this semester. Ali has one and I have one. The plan is for us to each build the team report (potential subpage to engineering projects) in our user space, and then the two of us combine them into one subpage at the end of the semester. Is there a better way to do this? --1sfoerster (discuss • contribs) 13:07, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
 * If a resource is a project associated with HCC, my opinion is that this should be shown. We give real-world instructor special support, you more-or-less own the projects you create. However, I will talk now about the "less" part of that.
 * Projects created here are released according to the site license. Generally, anything educationally useful should remain. A dumb project that went nowhere can still be useful as an example of dumb projects that go nowhere, and someone could even study that and look at why. That is, itself, a kind of engineering study.
 * I get the utility of the category tool. However, projects also have a primary focus, and that focus indicates the primary skills involved. The purpose of organizing Wikiversity is not to restrict. There are cross-disciplinary fields, and, in fact, what you are calling "general engineering" is cross-disciplinary.
 * Let me give an example from my own Favorite Topic, Cold fusion. Cold fusion, because of the name and the original claim, was considered to be "nuclear physics," and so people looked to experts on nuclear physics. But what was actually claimed by the discoverers of the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect was an "unknown nuclear reaction." The name cold fusion came from two sources: a newspaper reporter called it that, and the discoverers in their original paper had the word "Fusion?" at the end of the name. The journal dropped the question mark.
 * The discoverers were not physicists, and they had borrowed some equipment to measure neutrons, and were whacked by a newbie error, they believed they had found low levels of neutrons (far, far lower than what ordinary fusion would show) and so their speculation was in order, but they were quite clear that what they found did not behave like ordinary fusion.
 * What they really had were some experimental results with anomalous heat, and they were electrochemists, among the world's foremost, very much not newbies there, and they were expert in measuring heat.
 * The physicists criticizing them did not have that experience. Many tried to replicate their work and failed. That was entirely predictable, this was a very difficult experiment with lots of ways to get it wrong, plus the effect itself was chaotic, dependent upon very complex conditions in the experiment, something electrochemists are accustomed to dealing with and which physicists avoid like the plague.
 * So what field is Cold fusion? Is it physics or is it chemistry? In fact, it is, at this point -- since the mechanism is still a mystery -- chemistry, but with implications for physics, in a realm that physics does not understand well, but sometimes physicists are unaware of the assumptions they are making. Pons and Fleishmann were actually engaged in testing one of those assumptions, it was their explicit goal, and they expected to find that the assumption -- an approximation -- was valid. They proved themselves wrong. That is, in fact, what science is supposed to be about.
 * The way you are describing it, "General" in "General engineering" does have a meaning, but how broadly is this understood is not clear to me, i.e., would your work be undertaken in the Engineering department of a university? There is no Wikipedia article for "General engineering." What there is, is Engineering, which article makes it clear that this is a very broad field, with many specialized fields.
 * So at this point, I'd suggest a resource here that matches the Wikipedia article, Engineering and then there is a project page Engineering/Projects. Given that there are many projects already, with many more coming, I would then have subpages, and those would be sorted by field, which would be the primary field involved. These primary fields should correspond to readily-known engineering specialties. Which would cover many cross-disciplinary fields, and then what is not readily categorized this way would be under Engineering/Projects/General. It does not have to be perfect. We'd want to keep the Project page *fairly* simple, but there is no specific limit.
 * The Category system is used to develop cross-links, so Cold fusion is in a number of categories. (And that needs attention. It should really be in an electrochemistry category, and it is not what is ordinarily understood as nuclear chemistry. "Nuclear" remains generally controversial (though I know the work and it is not controversial among those who know the work! It's a nuclear effect, all right, beyond a reasonable doubt.)
 * So what is created is a structure easy to understand and maintain, and expandable far beyond the present scale.
 * My vision of Wikiversity is that it becomes larger than Wikipedia, because for every topic on Wikipedia, we can have many pages. An encyclopedia is the "sum" of knowledge, i.e., summary, a University library can have a huge number of documents on each topic. And add to that student work, discussions, etc. So we need to set up channels for all this to flow through, in an organized -- but not limiting -- way. Notice the catch-all category: General.
 * (Some topics on Wikipedia will not have a page here because of lack of interest, but, over time, and as sister links become ubiquitous on Wikipedia, those may be fewer and fewer, because there are specialists and fans of nearly everything, the planet is vast, and an encylopedia can never truly be a compendium of all knowledge. We could get closer. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:06, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Abd ... I like your enthusiasm. Your ability to write is amazing. I want to harmonize a vision with you. But I don't know where to do this. There must be a discussion going on like this somewhere in wikiversity. Is there a better place than here? --1sfoerster (discuss • contribs) 13:44, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, glad you asked. Organization. I think there are other places and, of course, some places like this where I and others have discussed organizational concepts. I've been acting on what I call, on the WV page, a rough, intuitive concept, but doing this alone is not going to work, long-term. Dave is pretty much on board, I think. And I find little opposition, if any. However, classic problem: there is also little interest. People are happy to have User:Somebody else handle it. Somebody else, a set of unattached local accounts, apparently expressed some "frank opinions or interpretations," on Talk:Human brain, on Wikipedia in 2004, and that was the end of it. So the rest of us will just have to muddle through. So, welcome. You could, for example, summarize what you understand of what I'm saying, there. Then we could work on it, and bring in others. From one, another. From the two, many. That's actually Qur'an. Are we having fun yet? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:19, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Section 550 Projects
Hi! I noticed your recent addition of project pages. As these are all student assignments related to a single course, we have two choices for the location of these pages. We can put them in a learning project, such as under General Engineering Projects, or they can go under user space if they are only for individual student use. Since we are unlikely to ever have an entire course on remote light switches, a top-level page is not the appropriate place for these resources. Where would you like to have these resources located? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 12:53, 29 October 2014 (UTC)