Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/December 2014

About opening visual editor for IP access
Hello every body,

I'm a Belgian contributor in French Wikiversity and I just come here to ask if this Wikiversity community can agree to the idea of opening the use of the visual editor for IP contributor which is concretely a simple switch on the php code but which need a consensus from the community before leave a request on bugzilla.

Access to the visual editor by IP address is some thing vital for me who a not English native speaker. By the way, I can ask to my English friends who are not registered and who don't wan to be, to go to my research pages for correcting English for of the contain.

Thanks a lot for your attention. I will waiting reaction community to know how to star the consensus process.

A nice day for every one.

--Lionel Scheepmans (  ✉  ) , le 04:53, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I would encourage everyone to try the VisualEditor, and also see Wikipedia: Wikipedia:VisualEditor and Wikipedia: Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback regarding issues and concerns. I noticed that Wikipedia tried having this feature available to all users by default last summer, and then turned it off after six weeks.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:53, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

TAO
The resource TAO, or Third Age Online, has its own category, Category:TAO, and about a hundred resources at Wikiversity. That's the good news! The not-so-good news is that the project was concluded in December 2013, the website is a deadlink, and its category has no category. I was thinking about putting them all up for deletion as they are abandoned for over a year, with the only recent additions coming from bots. What would the community like to do with these?

The easy solution is to put their category into a higher category associated with the internet and leave them as they are. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 02:25, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Since there are no other comments, I'd recommend adding a category and preserving the content. I have many pages myself that haven't had updates for more than a year.  I keep thinking it's because the quality is already there.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:40, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Compare law and administration in different jurisdictions?
What tools might exist to facilitate the comparison of law and administration in different jurisdictions?

I'd like to find a home and a structure to facilitate crowdsourcing research to compare current law and practices in issues related to the American Anti-Corruption Act (AACA). Wikiversity seemed to me like a reasonable home, because it supports research forbidden on Wikiversity, while sharing the Wikimedia policies of writing from a neutral point of view and citing credible sources.

However, I'd also like the capability to flag material with different subject matter, e.g., the eleven "provisions" of the AACA. I'd like to allow a volunteer to write a summary of the law and administration in a particular jurisdiction (e.g., California or San Jose, CA) with some kind of markup language to identify the which subject, e.g., conflicts of interest, to which a section, sentence or paragraph belongs, and eventually perhaps a score on some scale like the Freedom Scores assigned by Freedom House. This would be combined with some ability for a user to compare the material entered on a given subject for different jurisdictions -- either text or scores.

Suggestions? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 11:29, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your interest! The School:Law has a series of resources listed under "Law by Jurisdiction" that may be of help. I tried looking up the AACA under both "American Anti-Corruption Act" and AACA on Wikisource and Wikiquote, nada. Wikipedia does have an entry at AACA. The summary you propose is likely to be welcomed by our law department. I hope this helps. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 23:06, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Depending on the complexity of your structure, you might experiment with categories and subcategories. For example the category Category:Physics_equations has several subcategories, including Category:Physics equations/Quizzes.  I am not sure how many categories you need. If the categories are subcategories of a page I don't think there is a problem with polluting category namespace, but that needs to be looked into.


 * I even have the template category Category:Template:Physeq, which I developed when I discovered myself writing the same equation in various places (and having to make multiple changes when I changed something). But note: I think I violated Wikiversity policy when I put the template Template:Physeq1 into mainspace.  Either nobody noticed, or they didn't care, or it's OK to do that. In fact, I need a second edit of all my equation templates, and I will now post an inquiry about that right now. --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 23:19, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Technically, anything starting with Template: is in Template space rather than main space. The colon designates namespace, which is why colons should be avoided in mainspace titles.  We don't have any stated guidelines on template placement, but what I go by when creating or moving content is templates that are only used in a single project are better as subpages of that project, and templates used by multiple projects are best in the Template: namespace.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:47, 12 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you all very much. I've looked some in School:Law including "Law by Jurisdiction", as suggested by User:Marshallsumter.  I may also experiment with categories, as suggested by User:Guy vandegrift.  First, however, I think I'll study School:Law a bit more.  Thanks again.  DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 07:11, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't fully understand it, but w:Wikipedia:Categorization looks useful. There seems to be two entirely different meanings of the word "subcategory".  Wikipedia defines it as placing a child category into a parent category by inserting , usually at the bottom of the child.  But you can also define a subcategory a la Wikiversity's subpage system by creating the page in namespace Category:parent/child .  Then when you look at the child category a link to the parent appears at the top in the usual way. --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 13:24, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

The process of converting classic talk pages to Flow
(BG: Flow). There are various ways to convert talk pages to Flow. Discussed at this page. I would like to know what we would like to have. Please join the discussion and spread it to other language village pumps. Gryllida 23:59, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

A less cluttered way to include multiple sister links.


I spent the morning knocking myself out trying to create a better template for multiple wikilinks. With more than 4 or 5 links, the boxes on the right look tacky. Finally it dawned on me that using a template to do the job is like cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer. The links to left are just captions to a figure.

If anybody wants to me add another sister, I can easily modify this image on commons.

--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 20:09, 13 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Fwiw, here's an example of our current layout for sister links on categories at en.wn (via our template : example. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:58, 14 December 2014 (UTC)


 * While I realize these have probably been considered, here's my two favorites: --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Marshallsumpter, I didn't know about them. At the very least, I will switch to the same image used in the templates you showed us. But only after I verify that they do not permit multiple links. --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 01:23, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Do you like w:Template:Sisterlinks? —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:30, 25 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I may not have learned all the options, but I get the feeling that all the sister link templates are too limited in their options. They allow only one link, and they do not permit flexibility in what is said.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 17:05, 25 December 2014 (UTC)
 * For inspiration on what can be done, another style of sister-linking template is n:Template:Sisters. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 03:48, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #10—2014
 Did you know? Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is now available. You can add and delete tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid  and   elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing +  or  +.

You can now create and edit simple  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "" into a "".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing " " will make the line a bullet list; " " or " " will make it a numbered list; " " will make it a section heading; " " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change.

There are also two other keyboard sequences: " " for opening the link tool, and " " for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like +  to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead
The current VisualEditor design will be replaced with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at mediawiki.org in late December and on other sites in early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January.

Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Translations of the user guide for most languages are outdated. Only Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translations are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
 * If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF) 18:59, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Incident-driven policy development
Abd wrote, "What Wikiversity has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate is that it is possible for a wiki to actually study and discuss topics, neutrally. This is largely my design, though following general ideas found in Wikiversity from its foundation. As a result of procedures we have developed, conflict is very low on Wikiversity, for such an active wiki covering a very wide range of topics. Most conflict that remains is personality-based, we had some drama this year from ... Leucosticte and a rogue sysop. We dropped the sysop, and Leucosticte went elsewhere, finding that the community resisted hosting extremely hot topics -- the kind that people go ballistic over, readily, as on RationalWiki, which became seriously emotional over Leucosticte. He could have created educational resources on his favorite topics, but the community, mostly me and the most active sysop -- required ethical guidelines be in place first. . ..

"You were offered an opportunity to work on guidelines, it would have been supported. Nobody else is active trying to create material that is so controversial, AFAIK. Wikiversity is big enough that I certainly don't know everything going on. There are *rough* guidelines in precedents. One of the ways to create guidelines is to explore the controversial area, with caution and consultation. You actually started that. You created a page that was, my opinion, beyond the pale, and you asked about it. I saw it and knew what could happen, I tagged it for speedy deletion and a sysop agreed. But then you were attacked anyway, and the attack continued on Wikiversity after you left to take your suicide method marbles to Wikibooks. By the way, how is the Wikibooks project going? I looked. I didn't notice that you were doing anything lately."

It seems that in politics, a lot of times, policy development is driven by incidents. Hence all the laws on the books that are named after dead children. E.g., Holly's Law. Of course, the problem with such cases is that people tend to make them under the influence of strong emotions and a sense of needing to address an immediate emergency. When flooded in this way, people tend to resort to the most reflexive, least intellectually sophisticated responses. But on the other hand, sometimes when there's calmness and no pressing impetus for a change, nothing gets done, and we're left with the status quo. Fear and anger seem to be some of the main driving forces in politics, leading to the organization of activists for volunteer activities that otherwise would make little sense to devote so much effort to. Unless, of course, they had nothing better to do. The fearmongers can be on either side of the debate, whether fearing free expression or fearing censorship.

If someone else tries to create suicide-related pages here, perhaps he'll be told what I was told, which was that ethical guidelines need to be set forth first. Then he'll probably go away, without any ethical guidelines having been set in place, and no progress will have been made toward fixing the situation. Unless you look at the status quo as already representing perfection, which any change would disturb.

Remember the Paul Romer quote, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." I think that crisis was wasted. But, so that this isn't entirely an unproductive rant, might I ask, what are some basic principles that might be the foundation of ethical guidelines for that type of content? The only one that comes to my mind is, "Advocate what you will, but don't incite imminent lawless action." So, for example, it would be okay to say "Killing yourself is a good idea" to the world at large, but if a user says "I'm thinking of jumping off a bridge later today" we shouldn't say "do it". See also Ethics for pages concerning illegal or physically dangerous activities‎. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 16:06, 28 December 2014 (UTC)