User talk:Iszmael

 Hello and Welcome to Wikiversity Iszmael! 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! --Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 22:56, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Class Projects
Welcome to Wikiversity, and thanks for bringing your students here! While Atcovi's suggestion that students use their user space for page development is a good one, I would instead recommend that a course project page be set up, and students would create their pages under the course project. Examples of classes that use this approach include:
 * Digital Media Concepts
 * Federal Writers' Project - Life Histories
 * Instructional design
 * Menomonie, Wisconsin History
 * North Carolina World War I
 * World War I -- Life Histories

What would be the best title to use as the overall project page for your class and the student's efforts? Alternatively, what is the title of the course you are teaching? Once I have this information, your students' pages can be moved under this main project, and the pages should be fine and left alone after that. They can even be blank, as they won't be main pages. If the student pages remain where they are, they will be subject to editing by others. Main pages are open to all.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 22:22, 3 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your welcome and your prompt and kind assistance. I believe that setting up a project page that would be a sort of umbrella page for my students' work is a wonderful idea (incidentally, they themselves like it too as I mentioned your suggestion to them in my  class today). I glimpsed the projects you quote in your message and the way they are set up makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that contrary to them my students' projects are not homogeneous, as the idea of the class is to make them familiar with editing various projects on-line using, in this case, Wiki mark-up language and resources. Their projects, which should have some educational value,  are either related to their academic pursuits (mostly language, literature, translation) or to their interests (they are all students at the Institute of British and American Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland). The name of the real world course I'm teaching is "Editing Internet Texts", which, I guess, is too vague and misleading to be used on Wikiversity.  Frankly, I'm at a loss here and I would welcome your possible suggestions.


 * Should I supply you with the URLs of my students' projects, their login names or both? Now I have all eighteen of them. There is a possibility that a few more exchange students will join the course soon - could I add them to the course project place or you would need to do that?


 * I appreciate you help and I hope we can work this out. Wikiversity is a great resource though overshadowed by Wikipedia and thus little known to the outsiders.


 * --Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 20:42, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I've created Editing Internet Texts and moved the students' pages under that learning project. When the projects are finished, students are welcome to move their pages back to the main space if they wish, or they can remain under this learning project. In future semesters, we can create a semester subpage for archiving previous works.
 * Please encourage your students to consider creating a learning project for the literature pages they were working on in their sandboxes. That all seemed to be content that would provide a good example to others of how Wikiversity may be used as a teaching and learning environment. If they can provide a new learning project title and a list of pages or usernames, I'd be happy to create the learning project and move the pages. Thanks!
 * Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * You are fast! Thank you! I'll let the students know about the new setup so that they may start working on developing their projects. So the students whose projects/URLs were not included on the original list should use the subpage template/script you included in the present page to create their individual project? I will encourage the students to possibly join forces and work on a few literature-related projects. Once again, a lot of thanks!
 * --Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 22:11, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * If they have starter pages already created, they should move them to Editing Internet Texts/... . Otherwise, yes, they can just create a new subpage using the input box. If, in the future, you decide you want an actual template to start new pages, that can be added as well. The current one is just a blank page with the right title prefix. Enjoy! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Template:Location mark+
I have a technical problem you may be able to help me with. Some of my students in "Editing Internet Texts" class would like to use the template Wikipedia :Template:Location mark+ to provide some details related to the Wikimedia graphic files (pictures) they'd like to include in their Wiki projects. However, the template doesn't seem to work properly on Wikiversity pages, though it works all right on Wikipedia I checked it myself and no luck. This is the exact template coding (copied from the template page I quoted above) they and me have tried to include in our Wikiversity pages:

Is it the case that some templates work only in selected Wiki services? Or the problem lies elsewhere? I will appreciate your help in this matter as I haven't been able to find much help on help pages. --:--Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 20:12, 23 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Templates often depend on other templates. In this case there are eight supporting templates we didn't have, either. There's no magic recipe. We have to keep importing and testing until the errors go away or change to a different type of error. By the way, these should always be imported rather than copied. Imports bring in the history, necessary for both licensing and troubleshooting. See Imports to request an import. Try location marks now and see if they work or if more needs to be imported. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:47, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Dave, for your help - the import did the trick and the template seems to be working all right now. Following your suggestion I  also posted  a request for the import  on Imports. I really appreciate your time. Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 21:07, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Errors in editing (referencing)
Dear Dave,

As my students in "Web Translation Projects" are busy learning basic Wiki editing, they have encoutered the following two problems while using sandboxes to practice various editing modes:

1. An error message: "Error: This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed.... A brief description of the abuse which your action matched is: New User Created Page with External Link". This message was displayed in sandboxes of at leat 4 students using the "Edit" option rather than "Edit source" option and precented them from saving the page. When on my suggestion they removed all the links from their pages, used "Edit source" option, the page could be saved and the same links were added manually without a problem.

2. In one sandbox project, the comment that appeared at the end of an outside reference link was "Check date values |date= (help)" and clicking on the "help" link returned nothing. This appeared in the sandbox of MiaBlue1 user, Reference 1

I would appreciate your help in this matter. Thank you Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 11:59, 29 March 2021 (UTC)


 * 1. This is because they are brand new users. It goes away after a few days and a few edits. The most important thing they can do is not wait for deadlines in order to start their pages. In the future, encourage them to create their accounts and pages when the assignment starts rather than when the first draft is due.
 * 2. See . There is something wrong with "date=1860date". I don't know what the correct information is for this, so I can't fix it for the student. They just need to edit carefully and correct the date information.
 * Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)



Thank you, Dave, for your help. I thought the first problem was related more to the script responsible for using the "Edit" mechanism, as when manually editing the source one, even if a newbie, would not encounter such a  problem with referencing. I've passed the information to my students, who btw need to learn to be patient and exact with editing. Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 21:08, 29 March 2021 (UTC)



One of my students created a project page at: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Web_Translation_Projects/Translation_of_irony_and_sarcasm_in_TV_series using the script you prepared: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Web_Translation_Projects When she (or myself, for that matter) are logged in, the title of her subpage is listed at https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Web_Translation_Projects. When we are not logged in, only the first subpage "Approaches to Translating Dialog" shows up - hers does not. Is it that she did something wrong or that there is some mechanism I/my students are not aware of? Soon about ten of them will set up their subpages so I would like to advise them. Thank you for your help. Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 07:55, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * I see three subpages (currently) either logged in or not. I suspect you had already looked at the page when not logged in, and are seeing an outdated cached copy of the page rather than the current version. Wikimedia did change the caching recently so that new changes don't always show up when viewing the page again. I will add a purge / refresh link to the page so you can force it to update. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 13:29, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your help and comments - it must have been the caching, because now everything seems to be OK. Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 16:19, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Problems with subpages - Web Translation Projects
Dear Dave,

one of my students of the nickname Julkubi launched a project on Approches to Translating Dialect Wikiversity page under  https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Web_Translation_Projects. The page contains links to subpages (in the section "Berezowski's strategies"), but all the subpages names and links to them are listed now on the umbrella/category page Web_Translation_Projects. I guess insted of using the markup tag ..., she used /..../ , but I am not sure. She changed the tags, but to no avail - the links are still listed. As they unbalance and clatter the structure of the umbrella/category page, they should be removed somehow, but I don't really how. I would appreciate your help in the matter/ Thank you. --Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 15:56, 1 June 2021 (UTC)


 * See for how to link subpages. No dots necessary.
 * There is no easy way I know of to only display subpages to one level. What you would have to do if you want to eliminate them from the main list is replace the Subpages/List with links to the subpages you want to include. It works fine but requires maintenance every time a user adds a subpage. There is a way to do it with categories, if every subpage is in the main category. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:23, 2 June 2021 (UTC)



I'm not sure I understand. For instance, in my other past class: [] one of the students developed a Wiki project on gemstones: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Editing_Internet_Texts/Gemstones. On the main page of the project, in the section "Alphabetical list of gemstones" she inserted a table containing the names of gemstones, which at the same time are links to subpages, e.g. /Agate/. However, these subpages are NOT listed on the umbrella/category page []. What is the difference then between this and the other page? Coding is exactly the same. Am I missing something? --Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 07:14, 2 June 2021 (UTC)


 * On Editing Internet Texts each displayed subpage is listed manually. If you were to replace that with, as on the current Web Translation Projects, you would see all subpages listed. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:32, 2 June 2021 (UTC)



Thank you, Dave, for your help. There is another problem that I've just become aware of. Someone of the login name Paul Doleza launched a new Wiki page under the category "Web Translation Projects" called "Follow my leadership" at: [], He/she is not one of my students, the page he/she created is empty and the title does not seem to reflect even a remotest relation with translation projects. I understand anyone can contribute to almost any Wikiversity projects, but what don you do in a situation when someone inetntionally or by mistake sets up a Wikipage that does not seem to serve any purpose and does not belong to the category under development? --Iszmael (discuss • contribs) 08:33, 6 June 2021 (UTC)


 * If it has value, we save it and move it to their user space. If it has no value, we delete it. It's gone. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:45, 6 June 2021 (UTC)