User talk:JWSchmidt

[[Image:Duck-Rabbit illusion.jpg|thumb|left|Liberation. When we can see the world in more than one way.What is Wikiversity?*A Wikimedia project WikipediaDisease.png-free zone. Please do not come here as part of an attempt to disrupt the Wikiversity project by deleting learning resources, censoring Wikiversity discussions or imposing blocks or bans on a Wikiversity community member.]] This is a page for discussions with and about User:JWSchmidt. I also welcome nuggets of information that might not really require significant discussion, so if you know something that you suspect I might like to know, please leave me a note on this page.
 * A wiki website
 * An online community
 * An e-learning experiment
 * All of the aboveDuckrabbit]]

Newer discussions are on this page. Older discussions are in the discussion archives.

Will you allow us to welcome you home?
JWS, I just came across File:Logo Movie.gif, which you created, just like you created much of this project. It reminded me to tell you I'd love to welcome you home, here.

I've written before about what that would take, it would simply be a commitment to leave the past in the past, and to move forward developing Wikiversity into what you and others saw possible here. We are doing it.

I was blocked for almost two years, by the same custodian who last blocked you. That's just a fact. If I were to belabor that fact, over and over, using it to draw conclusions about that custodian or Wikiversity, I'd probably be blocked again! However, working on this project, developing resources as is uniquely possible here, and, now, even working on Wikiversity structure and organization, I'm unimpeded, as you could be. Please consider requesting unblock, perhaps as I did. There, I expressed my clear intention to focus only on developing educational resources. As it developed, I began working again on Wikiversity structure, and so I just asked Jtneill, who unblocked me, about this, but I doubt that he will object, and if he does, we'll deal with it collaboratively.

If you commit to sticking to the positive, I'd personally trust you, and I'm sure you could be readily unblocked. Times have very clearly changed. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:01, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Unblock request
I was blocked because I was unable to let go of being deeply offended by events on Wikiversity, and continued to rehearse them, to point and link to them, to express my anger and frustration over those events.

I now commit to working on learning projects such as Science Fiction Challenge. I will avoid basing my editing on what happened in the past. I will avoid controversy and will not edit when I am upset, but will ask other users for help, on or off-wiki. I will respect and will respond civilly to warnings from custodians and other users, and will proceed with caution if my work offends anyone. --JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 01:25, 6 May 2015 (UTC)


 * See see Colloquium review. note added by Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:14, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back!
Thanks for doing what it took to allow me to welcome you! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 12:56, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Happy to see you here again.--Juandev (discuss • contribs) 13:17, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

The nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie
The nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie has been moved to Science Fiction Challenge/The nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie. We've undertaken a major effort over the last two years to organize Wikiversity content by learning project rather than individual resource title. This helps avoid deletions such as occurred to Science Fiction Challenge/Admiring Odin. Let me know if you have any questions. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:20, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I didn't quite understand what Dave meant about Admiring Odin. The page wasn't deleted, as far as I could tell, Dave moved it under the learning project. I didn't see the deletion in the page log. Looking at your edits, though, I saw the undeletion request. It is now routine that any speedy-deleted page is restored on request, there is rarely an argument. Courtesy would be to ask the deleting admin first. We only use RfD if there is some disagreement. But it's okay.


 * Technically, that deletion was in error, in several ways. It was a linked page, requiring a bit more thought. The user wasn't notified. We don't notify spammers and vandals, but this wasn't spam or vandalism. It was explicitly a learning project, for the user.


 * However, in my view, the page is not developed enough to be worth generations of users clicking through to it from the Challenge page. So I have prodded it.


 * John, the prod template, new in 2012, substituted, gives the page three months, and if nobody removes the tag, it's routinely deleted if any custodian agrees with deletion. This allows us to notice something probably useless, but postpone the deletion. Without this kind of tool, we had arbitrary deletions that caused harm, in one direction, and we had junk piling up, in the other.


 * I also notified the user, and emailed him. I'll be thrilled if he returns and removes the template....


 * Meanwhile, its up to you if you want the link to that page in the Challenge project, as it is. I'd think of removing it, myself. We do want to encourage uses to create, but we also want the resources we and they create to be maximally useful. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:06, 11 May 2015 (UTC)


 * . Nice. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 11:23, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Welcome Template
The template must be substituted to work correctly. Try. This eliminates the need to sign the post afterwards. Let me know if you have any questions. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:14, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for re-joining the WV:Welcoming committee. Started a project at one point to stand for making this reliable (see the Talk page). No particular interest showed up.


 * In any case, the following seems to have settled as standard welcoming practice: I first learned this from my first mentor, though later he dumped it and welcomed indiscriminately. We do not welcome upon registration, and a lot of registration happens automatically, now, anyway, with SUL. Rather we welcome on the first edit that appears to be even reasonably good faith. What this does is to generate an effective filter by which any of us may notice new accounts in Recent Changes: a redlinked talk page. When I do RCP and see a redlinked talk page from a contribution, I will generally look at the contributions, and welcome, unless the contributions are vandalism or spam. But what is spam? This is somewhat new: there is a common spam user pattern, they register an account and create a User page quite like . We do assume good faith; however, because this is a spam pattern, I would not welcome that user yet. I'd leave the talk page redlinked so that it gets further attention. A non-spam edit, more than a likely bot-created user page, even just trying out the Sandbox, etc., I would welcome.


 * The harm of welcoming a spammer is not large. So don't worry, we won't be yelling at you over this! However, I will ask you to watch out for treating User page creations like this as a sign of participation. If you look at it closely, it is not a real communication. It shows zero interest in education. There are no real personal details. It says "I'm glad to come across you," but the user has not come across anyone. It's a first registration on Wikiversity (which is unusual). There is no email setup, so the user is quite unlikely to notice the welcome. 95% or more this is a spammer. We may never know. Most of the accounts created are throwaway.


 * There is some "interesting" discussion on that Welcoming committee talk page, particularly on the Colloquium linked from there, and a truly hilarious careless welcome. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:46, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Possibly of interest to you
As one of the founders of Wikiversity, I'd like you to look at permanent link). Please be extremely careful, this is a steward and I'm not asking you to play Don Quixote. There is background at User:Abd/Volleyball. Most of all, I'm interesting in your support (or other reaction) on the issue of Wikiversity mission. There is a collision between Wikipedian values and the Wikiversity mission. You, obviously, were very upset by that collision, but this is the political reality: the encyclopedic mission dominates the WMF.

In fact, that vision has become blinded and partially disempowered by very normal social processes, that blindsided the original Wikipedians, they were not socially sophisticated, to be able to expect and avoid what would naturally occur, with what they set up.

To move beyond this, we must ourselves move beyond black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Blame never engages those blamed. The steward whose talk page I point to is, by far, not the worst of the lot, and what he does is normal practice, though the community at large is not aware of the gory details. If he is attacked, he is very popular, and the attacker will simply be whacked by the windmill blades. It's a big windmill.

No, we need to watch the windmill, learn how it works, respect its purpose, and then design systems to fulfill those purposes without causing the harm that we can see.

I write too much, myself. Please suppress your tendency to write a lot, unless it is on, say, the talk page for that Volleyball study in my user space. There, be completely free, as on my User talk page, but, of course, avoid incivility, assume good faith, etc. Thanks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:52, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Copyright notices
Template:File copyright was used in the following two sections. These two notices redacted by Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:45, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

What is the copyright of File:Second Nature.png?
-- Green Giant ( talk ) 15:54, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

What is the copyright of File:Kuula help board.png?
Green Giant ( talk ) 16:26, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Comments
See. It looks like Simone did not place all the files on Commons, he missed these two.

Green Giant, this was discussed in 2011, see the link. The consensus was that copyright was adequately established through Second Life rules and JWSchmidt's claim of "I made this." See and the edit summaries at  and. Simone based his action on those edit summaries and the comments here. If necessary, we would claim Fair Use, but it does not appear necessary. Thanks, GG, nice to see you at Wikiversity, stick around!

JWS, it might simplify things if you add explicit information to the files, it was the lack of that which caused Green Giant to tag them (which is much better than what was done before, that ISTE in SL file was summarily deleted without notice, which I thought, ah, well, maybe I shouldn't say.... wata unda da bridge.) I personally don't like moving our files to Commons, because it has often happened that, some years later, a Commons decision is made to delete, because on the precautionary principle or whatever, when we might well decide to keep the file, sometimes we claim fair use. There is no harm with files being in both locations, but I'm not exercised to move these files. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:45, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the links; makes more sense now. I agree that files should only be moved to Commons if they are explicitly licensed or PD. I hate to delete moved files, which is why I'm on a quest to sort things out at this end before we get to a Commons Deletion Requests. Slightly off-topic but you might remember NonFreeWiki; well I'm still not convinced that moving it to Commons will work but I've finally found the time to set up a couple of demos at WMFLabs (a mission in itself) and hopefully they will be ready for testing soon.   Green Giant  ( talk )  01:44, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

"it might simplify things if you add explicit information to the files" <-- It was simple when I uploaded these images. At that time, there was a statement at Wikiversity that said by uploading content I asserted that it was not copyright protected. Images like "Second_Nature.png" are obviously intended for an educational purpose and if anyone wants to challenge their copyright status or use at Wikiversity they can come to this user talk page and discuss the matter with me. Any attempt to delete such images behind my back (such as placing a speedy deletion template on the image page) is disruptive to the Wikiversity mission. Users who participate in such disruption should not be editing Wikiversity. --JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 10:07, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
 * JWS, you never really paid attention to what I was doing when I was a custodian. What you may have overlooked or forgotten:
 * I argued extensively for primacy of educational purpose. I have written a license for files like yours, i.e., depending on an edit summary of "own work" or the like.
 * However, I also took flak for it, and received very little support. Because I understood wiki traditions, and referred to them, you frequently attacked me, even when my goal was to return you to normal activity.
 * Our procedure would normally notify you of a speedy deletion attempt. That was skipped by the probationary custodian, Simone. As you might recall, I undeleted and notified you. Once again, I got only personal grief from that kind of action. Simone, however, did research and found what Green Giant has now affirmed, site policy for Second Life, and he transferred the images to Commons, leaving the two in question here. There remain some problems and we may still need to claim Fair Use.
 * You created our Exemption Doctrine Policy, and it requires machine-readable tagging of all non-free content. The problem with the images I see is that there may be an avatar in them you did not create. It's an unclear issue to me. Because of this, it is not impossible the images will be deleted on Commons.
 * We are part of the WMF family of wikis, and are subject to WMF policy. We cannot treat attempts to enforce WMF policy as "disruption." You might notice that I suggested Green Giant work more on making the images fully legitimate, which is more work than simply tagging as missing license information. And you might notice that GG responded very positively to that suggestion. Please be careful about assuming that "Wikipedians" -- he is really a Commons admin -- are out to disrupt Wikiversity, just because they request deletion.
 * It is part of our job, if we take it on, to educate them, as I have long worked to support the education of "disruptive users," such as children or, see RCA and the Colloquium, volleyball fans from the Philippines.
 * To manage this and make it sustainable requires the presence of users who will stand for our purpose, positively, instead of merely attacking those with different views. I hope you will join us, but this is a wiki. It's all optional.
 * If you decline to handle possible copyright issues, now that you are aware of them, I may decide to do it myself, but the users I've done that before were absent, not available. I hope that you will take responsibility for your content. Leaving the detatiled licensing information out was an oversight, back then. We are now stricter about that, commonly. The goal is always to support the user, while, at the same time, maintaining compliance with WMF policy. Both are needed. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:16, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

>"I hope that you will take responsibility for your content." <-- Has a copyright violation claim been made for something that I uploaded? If so, then I should be notified about that claim. Self-appointed Wikicops who show up at Wikiversity and start deleting educational content are irresponsible. Wiki editors who adopt the approach "when in doubt, speedy delete" are disruptive and should not be editing at Wikiversity. It is sad that Wikiversity became a learning community where wiki editors must watch their educational resources be destroyed during endless copyright hysteria pogroms and other manifestations of Wikipedia disease. --JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 10:48, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I wonder if you have read a recent essay of mine: Wiki studies/Wiki disease. Yes, indirectly, a claim was made, though not exactly "copyvio." True copyvio is rare on WMF wikis. The issue is complex, and arises because of the official WMF goal of "free content," which was defined as including "free for commercial re-use." The claim was "missing license information." The custodian deleted, in 2011, on own initiative, which was out-of-process, and so I undeleted, being a custodian at the time (also probationary). The custodian then moved almost all the files to Commons, and gave them a license which relied on your edit summary, but, technically, your edit summary was not a release. You had the right to release, because you made it, but did you actually release the files? Yes, you claim site license as an agreement, and I have used that argument to keep pages proposed for deletion. It gets more complicated because that custodian then deleted the local copy, as moved to Commons, a common practice which obscures the license.
 * You may call this "copyright hysteria," but I would call it a somewhat obsessive focus on technical propriety, and a loss of focus on the purpose of the wiki. This is one of the characteristics of "Wikipedia disease," which should really be called, more simply, "Wiki disease," when the wikis develop customs and practices as did the WMF wikis, including Wikiversity.
 * JWS, one of the characteristics of wiki disease is that dissenters in the community do not develop skill at handling process, but instead focus on protest, mostly complaint about abuse. One might consider this an primitive immune system response that fails to handle the primary cause of the infection, but that attacks infected parts of the body. There were elements moving in this community that were functionally addressing Wikipedia disease. You did not identify and support them, indeed, you opposed. I was three times a probationary custodian. I was up for confirmation as permanent several times. How did you vote? I have argued against our present WV:EDP, which you created, as not designed well for Wikiversity purpose. Have you supported these efforts in any way? I would quite freely use non-free rationales, and have done so. I would extend this to user space, reflecting actual practice in universities, were personal-use copying is common. There have been objections. Have you commented, supporting? You had an opportunity to make your voice heard even when you were blocked, with the Assembly proposal (which includes a proxy system, and which can then represent even banned users.) Did you respond to that?
 * Now, consider this case. GG is a Commons administrator. He did not "delete" anything. He tagged pages with missing license information. On Commons, he would routinely handle such. On Wikiversity, the tag sets up a proposed deletion with a seven-day expiration. True and clear copyvio is speedied, and if he believed that this was an unremediable situation, he'd have speedy-tagged the pages. He did not. He notified you. This was cooperative, collaborative process, and if you are going to call users who are cooperative and collaborative "self-appointed wikicops," you will be contributing to the toxic atmosphere that is an aspect of Wiki disease, simply out of an established knee-jerk response. Very human, and Wiki disease is very human. We can do better, JWS.
 * In this case, license information is still missing. You actually copied the page from Second Life. You provided no URL, and no evidence that you were the Second Life user who *created* that content. GG, I'm suspecting, is anticipating a challenge to the content on Commons on this basis. You can easily fix this, but there could be an issue about the woman avatar. I would argue for keeping the file, because that woman is de minimus. Those arguments sometimes fail. Commons can be brutal. That is one reason why I generally oppose routinely deleting files moved to Commons from here. If they are deleted on Commons, there is then no backup file, license information here, if any, has been concealed, and it's trouble to get the page back. Nothing is saved by deletion. (A soft redirect might be used to Commons, keeping the content accessible).
 * GG is the author of a proposal that could fix a lot of the disruption over "copyvio," NonFreeWiki, and see Requests for comment/Creation of a Global Wikimedia Commons.
 * I have often confronted "copyright hysteria." But I don't call it that, usually. Green Giant was not "hysterical," he was simply taking a normal action for a cross-wiki user, as he is. Commons users are frequently extremely sensitive to copyright issues, arguing ridiculously fine points of copyright is a normal Commons pastime. My view, it's a waste of time, when mixed with the educational mission of the WMF. Green Giant's proposal could reduce that. I have suggested that a new wiki is not needed, that all Commons has to do is to host non-free content, separately tagged, wherever there is any claimed usage on WMF wikis. Commons could also become much more useful, generally, if they hosted thumbnails of whatever they now delete. Google does it routinely for all material, and they link to sources. Totally legal, and educational. *And with tagging of non-free content* it still serves the commercial purpose.
 * But what it fails to do is to force users to find alternative images, it fails to coerce users into becoming laborers for ultimate commercial users. I'd say let those who want free images (as distinct from, say, NC images or fair use) do the work. Let others pursue educational purpose. Green Giant's point has been that Wikipedia is full of fair use images. Further, there is even content where there is a protest from a copyright claimant, so someone who uses a certain famous image could be exposing themselves to a lawsuit. It's quite a mess, and the system, being black and white (delete or keep), is inflexible and difficult to maintain, requiring constant and often contentious debate.
 * Again, JWS, we will solve these problems by finding consensus, by considering the goals of all users and players in the system, not by complaining about some segment of the community as abusive or specially diseased.
 * Human society is suffering from various natural products of our evolutionary history, such as racism and other knee-jerk thinking.
 * This is your talk page. I will fully stand for your right to be wrong here (or, to say it more neutrally, to express opinions on this page that might be objectionable if voiced, say, on the Colloquium). I will support your blog, if anyone ever attempts to delete it without your permission. Besides, that's a fantastic zombie!
 * We all become zombies, not fully alive, but not dead either, when we act as robots, simply reacting to our past. Some might say this condition is inescapable, but my experience is contrary. Something else is possible for us, that appears to be able to create possibilities anew, never before seen. The capacity for that is rare, it appears, but it also appears that it's possible to train for this.
 * How about it, JWS? Old dog, new tricks? I was 66 when I undertook training, in 2011, and, as was my common habit, I went deeply into it. I did learn some new tricks, I'm still learning, and more than that, I recovered my childhood enthusiasm, recovered my connection with academia, and was published in a major peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal, and have had many other amazing adventures. None of this was going to happen while I sat fat and happy with my precious "identity." Game?
 * Here, "taking responsibility" would be supplying missing information from the file, as users are normally expected to do, and as the upload instructions now ask for, and may have asked for back then. Yes, a lot of pages don't have that. Cleanup is slow. We do not want to damage resources, so I will often claim Fair Use here, i.e., setting up a Non-free use rationale. Old iffy pages with no use, I will tag for speedy deletion, on sight, unless the user is active, in which case I'll provide time. Almost always notice is provided, so a user may object, and we do follow policy on this: speedy deletion tags may, in practice, be removed by any user, and if a file is speedy deleted, it will normally be restored on request, and then if someone still wants deletion, it must be discussed. We actually have functional process, JWS. I still think there are some Wiki disease problems, but they are on a different scale than I think you have in mind. Your impressions are from the past. If you have present cause for them, point it out! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:32, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify, I have had the displeasure of deleting hundreds of files transferred to Commons from wikis like Wikiversity by well-meaning but ill-informed users. In the past few months I have found hundreds of files on wikis from Meta to Wikiversity and Wikibooks to Wikinews, which have been tagged for transfer to Commons but as a Commons admin I can see that they will be deleted there. So I've untagged them and tried to get uploaders to attend to their uploads. True, some of them have been deleted because they don't follow the policies of those wikis but a significant number have been fixed and then transferred to Commons. It is better to raise the issues here rather than files being deleted twice (here and on Commons).
 * The biggest obstacle to keeping these kind of files on Commons is that the originals are deleted after transfer and it is a headache to ask for the details of each deleted file at the original wiki (sometimes taking weeks). In the past we tried to remedy this with a proposal that Commons admins should be allowed to view deleted files on other wikis but the proposal did not succeed. This is why I try to nip the problem in the bud by trying to get the files fixed before transfer. To be honest I don't really want any files to be deleted if it can be avoided.
 * On these two files we've solved the source problem and part of the license problem by using Second Life screenshot and Second Life copyright. The only thing left is for you to either declare them as own work (and license them for reuse) if they are your own work or make a non-free use rationale. If the files end up being licensed, let me reassure you that they belong on Commons so they can be used elsewhere.
 * I'm sorry to see that you've misunderstood my purpose but I'm not a "wikicop". In fact I'm quite the opposite, for example if I nominate a Commons file for discussion I go the extra mile to leave a note on the talk pages of wikis where such files are used. I'm currently working on a proposal to overhaul Commons deletion procedure to reduce tensions with other wikis. This will include mandatory informing of affected wikis, extending of the discussion period from seven days to possibly twenty eight days (so we have increased chance of input from other wikis), inclusion of a new button on deleted file pages to enable a request for undeletion to be made with one click by registered users, etc. As Abd has mentioned above I'm also working on a second Commons-like repository for files that Commons won't accept but could be used on some wikis. So please don't look at my 200 or so Wikiversity edits and assume that I'm a mindless deletionist. By the way thank you for the kind words .  Green Giant  ( talk )  19:41, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Green Giant, please accept my apology on behalf of Wikiversity for the crankiness of our founder. If you'd been through what he went through, you might be cranky too. Yes, you have noticed many of the bugs in Commons process that I've seen. We can, however, simply stop deleting files here because they are transferred to Commons. This does no good, and it causes obvious possible harm. So I just edited Template:NowCommons and Category:NowCommons to remove reference to deletion, and removed the reference to pages moved to Commons as qualifying for speedy deletion on WV:Deletions. Some people don't like it when I do that without getting consensus first, but this has actually been discussed rather extensively, at various times. So ... running it up the flagpole, seeing if anyone shoots at it.
 * We can then deal with the Commons delinker vandal bot. Do you know if it checks for local copies?

Wikiverity editors tried to established image file rules that were suited for this project's goals, then a bunch of vandals from other Wikimedia projects arrived and imposed their unsuitable rules on Wikiversity. For years I argued long and hard about the destructiveness of mindless drones from the Commons project who claimed that images from Wikiversity should be transferred to Commons. Through the years, an endless stream of these vandals have shown up at Wikiversity and have shown no concern for the special nature of this project or the challenge of creating a learning community within Wikimedia. These vandals from other wiki projects just should not play their speedy delete games here. They are not needed here, but sadly they seem to have nothing better to do than come here and disrupt Wikiversity with their deletionist games. I mourn for all of the Wikiversity editors who have been driven away from this project by copyright hysteria and other manifestations of Wikipedia disease. I'm still waiting for the day when one person (just one!) from Commons who cares about the Wikiversity project comes to Wikiversity. Maybe then some sanity can be restored to the Wikiversity image file management process. I'm not holding my breath. --JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 02:00, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, JWS, you are holding your breath. If you let go, relax, and allow yourself to breath easy, you will discover that one such Commons user, actually an admin, just showed up. You will also discover that you are not the only person who has noticed "copyright hysteria," but there are others who are very willing to work to keep files here, to see that legitimate concerns are addressed, and that the Wikiversity educational purpose is served. I will look at your blog page. Do I get to see the zombie again? She is really spectacular.
 * If you would pay more attention, you would see that part of the problem here is the strict definitions in WV:EDP, which you brought here. We can define our own fair use policy, and as long as it serves WMF purposes, it will be accepted. One of the phenomena I ran into here was users who insisted that any local proposal must first be approved by the WMF before even being discussed here. So one went to the WMF and asked, and, very predictably, got a "No" answer, which is a great way to prejudice a discussion. Answers depend on questions, and when the people asking the question are just trying to find a way to shoot down a proposal, they will ask the questions to get the answer they want.
 * No, I wanted us to decide what we wanted. When we have consensus, we do have a large measure of autonomy, but going to the WMF before we have consensus is asking them to judge a hypothetical case. The non-free content policy is a huge can of worms, and, yes, it is contradictory to our educational goals. It created an enforcement nightmare, highly subjective, and where it was not subjective, it was purely damaging with no value generated. For example, insisting on free images of users in user space. 'Twere it up to me, I'd announce that user space is not subject to the free re-use goals of the WMF, that it all is not checked for "non-free." Nobody searches through student effects at universities looking for copyright violations (on the level of fair use). Our EDP did not understand that content is developed here in user space, often, whether or not it is ever moved to mainspace.
 * Template:NowCommons, my opinion, should be deprecated. Deleting those pages actually creates a license nightmare, I don't know how this ever became practice.
 * That is our template, JWS. However, I just edited it, and also our deletion policy page. "Moved to Commons," as I've edited it, is no longer a speedy deletion reason. I see that I had already noted the problem in 2014 on Category talk:NowCommons. Let's see if this sticks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:50, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
 * My ability to edit that guideline in anticipation of consensus is being challenged. If you care to comment on the changes I've proposed, that could be useful, since you participated heavily in the development of these policies, guidelines, and practices. Please be careful, please stay focused on the purpose: improving the guideline. Thanks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:35, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

You still around? :)
Hi JWS! Long time no see. Thought I'd stop by and say hello. Historybuff (discuss • contribs) 03:02, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Blogging on Wikiversity
Hi! You seem to be a blogger, so I thought I'd say hullo. :-) I've been having a look at creating some templates for blogging on Wikiversity. Just wondering what you think? I'm trying to bring Help:Blogs up to date, and have created blog post and blog post comments. Would you be interested in using these sorts of things? Do you have any other ideas? I've also created an RSS feed generator: . &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 04:02, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Status of the Blender coures
Thanks for the blender course, apparently created primarily by you. Are you still actively developing the course? I am an active Wikiversity editor and I am currently (struggling) to learn blender, version 2.79. I was about to create a course "Using Blender" when I came across the existing course. I had in mind gathering up the best YouTube video tutorials and organizing them into an easy-to-navigate structure. Are you open to augmenting your existing course with well-chosen YouTube tutorials? Would you welcome or be annoyed by my collaboration, and perhaps major restructuring of the existing materials? How can we best get the best learning resources assembled here to help students learn bender? Should I just go ahead with an alternative course to provide students some variety to choose from? Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 11:47, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but I'm no expert with that software. I have limited experience with DAZ3D, Bryce and POV-ray. Good luck! --JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 03:36, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

More cat dragging
Hey JWS!

Sorry for the long wikipause (and my vaporizing for a couple years) -- I found myself with a bunch of time on my hands (at the end of a job) and then found a "temporary" teaching job for a semester that ended up going 2+ years. Hope all is well with you, and I hope to come back and be more of a regular contributor here. Historybuff (discuss • contribs) 06:45, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Well, I'm probably here for the long haul this time -- I'm doing more school and maybe more teaching, mixed in with a bit of research. I saw there was a Sandbox 2 project -- were you involved with that? I went back to the original proposal and saw that the WMF committee which we were supposed to apply to got disbanded. Wow. Anyways, hope all is well, and hope to see you around these parts from time to time. Historybuff (discuss • contribs) 03:15, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Hey JWS... you know what they say, no rest for the wicked. I'm definitely on the educational treadmill now, but trying to enjoy things and have fun at the same time. I haven't been around enough to see if IRC is even around anymore, but I did make an actual content contribution. I'm thinking about starting up WCR or working on some other project, but who knows if anyone is interested. I'd like to fiddle a bit with screen recording and casting tech for education, and I've been playing with Moodle as well. Anyways, things will come along slowly but I'll be here more regularly. Historybuff (discuss • contribs) 07:09, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Life science
Whats an easier career between being a scientust and biologist

Italic 41.114.194.186 (discuss) 06:12, 14 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I spent some time as a research biologist and then I have been teaching biology for a couple of decades. In the middle, I had some time when I was supposed to being doing both. As long as you enjoy what you are doing, then either research or teaching feels "easy"... as long as you find a work environment that is free of crazy people. JWSchmidt (discuss • contribs) 22:51, 14 October 2023 (UTC)