Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/December 2022

CAS4Wiki
Pilot for using of web-based Computer Algebra in Wikiversity (CAS4Wiki) learning resources started for Mathematics with tailored predefined set of commands.--Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 10:10, 25 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Interesting! I'm looking forward to looking into this in more detail. Thanks for sharing. (By the way, your project Wiki2Reveal also looks interesting. I'm in the process of learning reveal.js myself.)--Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 04:29, 29 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep in mind that neither Wiki2Reveal nor CAS4Wiki is development based on scientific evidence published as articles in peer-reviewed journals. It is just a basic proof of concept and provides just an option to test a prototype in educational settings. --Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 10:44, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks Bert! I appreciate the clarification.-- Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 22:45, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikiversity featured in an article published by the Canadian Mathematical Society!
Hi all!

I wrote an article about Eventmath, a Wikiversity project, for a publication of the Canadian Mathematical Society. It was just published! The title is "An Invitation to Eventmath," and you're all invited to have a look! The article introduces Wikiversity along with Eventmath, which is a project that promotes mathematical literacy.

This is an open-access online publication, so you can read the article in this month's issue.

--Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 04:25, 29 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Tres bon, mon frere! Merci. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:25, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Merci pour les mots gentils! (I hope that makes sense. I used Google translate haha.) -- Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 22:43, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Join the Movement Charter Regional Conversation Hours

 * You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
 *  m:Special:MyLanguage/MyLanguage/Movement Charter/Community Consultation/Announcement/Regional conversations • 

Hi all,

As most of you are aware, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) is currently collecting community feedback about three draft sections of the Movement Charter: Preamble, Values & Principles, and Roles & Responsibilities (intentions statement).

How can you participate and share your feedback?

The MCDC is looking forward to receiving all types of feedback in different languages from the community members across the Movement and Affiliates. You can participate in the following ways:


 * Attend the community conversation hours with MCDC members. Details about the regional community conversation hours are published here
 * Fill out a survey (optional and anonymous)
 * Share your thoughts and feedback on the Meta talk page
 * Share your thoughts and feedback on the MS Forum:
 * Preamble
 * Values & Principles
 * Roles & Responsibilities (statement of intent)
 * Send an email to:  if you have other feedback to the MCDC.

Community consultation hour for the United States and Canada will take place on Monday, 5 December 2022 on Zoom. You can check out more times here. The conversations will not be recorded, except for the section where participants are invited to share what they discussed in the breakout rooms. We will take notes and produce a summary report afterwards.

If you want to learn more about the Movement Charter, its goals, why it matters and how it impacts your community, please watch the of the “Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions which took place earlier in November 2022.

Thank you for your participation.

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee,  MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 13:51, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

User:Marshallsumter (again)
Radiation astronomy/Lensings uses the Commons file File:Icarus.png, which was caught up in a mass deletion request. Given that the file is in use here and the file it is derived from is in the public domain, it could theoretically be kept. But is it legitimately in use here? The page in question was created entirely by this user (and almost entirely in a ridiculous sequence of minor edits), who is now indefinitely blocked.

(By the way, this page is poorly written with excessive quotes; it needs some love from someone more familiar with Wikiversity.) Brianjd (discuss • contribs) 13:34, 8 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks for tip. I opened a section on Requests_for_Deletion and copy/pated your remark there.  All further discussion on this topic belongs at Requests_for_Deletion.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

On appropriate and inappropriate uses for userspace pages
Wikiversity does not currently have a policy page discussing the appropriate and inappropriate uses for user pages and subpages. I believe this makes it an outlier among Wikimedia projects; all of the other projects I've looked at have policies setting standards for the use of these pages:


 * Wikipedia: Wikipedia:User pages
 * Wiktionary: Wiktionary:Usernames and user pages
 * Wikiquote: Wikiquote:User page
 * Wikibooks: Wikibooks:User pages
 * Wikisource: Wikisource:User pages
 * Commons: Commons:User pages

Several elements which are common to all of the userspace policies I reviewed, and which I expect to be relatively uncontroversial here, fall into the categories of:


 * Permitted content
 * User pages may be used for "basic information about yourself or your Wikimedia-related activities", as well as "limited autobiographical content", editing disclosures, and notes about a user's activity within the project
 * User subpages may additionally be used for (in no particular order) archives of user talk pages, personal writings about the project and/or its community, personal sandboxes and drafts, and technical pages like user scripts and stylesheets.
 * Disallowed content
 * Most projects start with a standard phrasing along the lines of "[Project] is not a blog, web hosting service, or social networking site". (Wikipedia adds "or memorial site".)
 * Material which is "likely to bring the project into disrepute", or which consists of "advocacy or support of grossly improper behaviors", is forbidden.
 * Advertising or "excessive self-promotional" content is forbidden.
 * Many sites disallow "polemical statements unrelated to [the project]", "statements attacking or vilifying groups of editors, persons, or other entities", and "material that can be viewed as attacking other editors, including the recording of perceived flaws".
 * Pages which are used for games (like role-playing sessions) or "secret pages" are frequently forbidden.

One element which will require some careful handling will be the use of userspace for longer-term drafts and as storage for pages removed from other namespaces. Most other projects prohibit this use of user subpages - for example, Wikipedia prohibits "user pages that look like articles", and allows drafts older than six months to be deleted without discussion; Wikibooks similarly proposes that userspace "should not be used to indefinitely host pages that look like textbooks, old revisions, or deleted content", and that "private copies of pages that are being used solely for long-term archival purposes may be subject to deletion". Since there is some substantial existing use of user pages for these purposes on Wikiversity, it would be inappropriate to impose a new policy banning that use without a transitional plan. That being said, I feel that allowing user subpages to bypass other content policies is not a sustainable approach either, especially given that Wikiversity user subpages are indexed by search engines.

So long as the community approves of my doing so, I'd like to start a draft of a userspace policy for Wikiversity, using the current Wikibooks policy as a template. If there are any serious objections to my doing so, or specific factors which should be addressed in our local policy, please let me know. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 05:04, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I question whether Google searches user subpages. In a Google search, quotations find exact matches.  The quote "assumption that the solution to Newton's second law for a mass" has been in my userspace for over 3.5 years, and Google did not find it.
 * The ability of userspace to hide from Google is uncanny. Not only subpages of my userpage hidden, but even my userpage is hidden, even if I restrict Google to Wikiversity:
 * "I am a retired physics professor" site:en.wikiversity.org finds nothing
 * "This is a course, therefore this entails" site:en.wikiversity.org finds Introduction to US History
 * Even without quotation marks: I am a retired professor site:https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Guy_vandegrift finds nothing! --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 13:25, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You might be right. I didn't see any  tags embedded on user pages to disable indexing, but it's possible that there's some other configuration in place which prevents them from being indexed.
 * Even if userspace isn't indexed, though, I don't think that should stop us from writing down some ground rules about what the project considers acceptable or unacceptable to include on user pages. They don't have to be exactly the same as the policies used on other Wikimedia projects, but I don't think they need to be especially different either. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 18:09, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * User space is blocked from searches. See mw:Help:Controlling search engine indexing and MediaWiki:Robots.txt. However, I would support having a policy for User: pages. There are multiple examples that I believe are not consistent with the Mission -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:31, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Aha! Robots.txt is the configuration I didn't think of which is blocking indexing of user pages, and I'm glad that's there. It looks as though we are missing search engine exclusions for user/draft talk pages, though, and I've opened a request on WV:RCA to fix that.
 * I'll start writing up a policy proposal at User pages over the next few days. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 04:43, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I've now got an incomplete draft at User:Omphalographer/User pages. (The irony of this does not escape me.) Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 01:30, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * When you are ready for feedback move it to Draft:User pages or Draft:Wikiversity user pages. I will use the talk page.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 04:19, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Once I've got the remaining "TBD" bits fleshed out and some other details fixed up it's getting moved to User pages with a proposal header. Draft project content in Wikiversity space is fine; we've had plenty of policy proposals get heavily revised or shot down before. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 04:32, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

FYI: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
An interesting thinkpiece that some of us may want to discuss: https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-hasnt-technology-disrupted-higher —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:45, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2023 opens in January


(There is a translatable version of this message on MetaWiki)

The Community Wishlist Survey (CWS) 2023, which lets contributors propose and vote for tools and improvements, starts next month on Monday, 23 January 2023, at 18:00 UTC and will continue annually.

We are inviting you to share your ideas for technical improvements to our tools and platforms. Long experience in editing or technical skills is not required. If you have ever used our software and thought of an idea to improve it, this is the place to come share those ideas!

The dates for the phases of the Survey will be as follows:


 * Phase 1: Submit, discuss, and revise proposals – Monday, Jan 23, 2023 to Sunday, Feb 6, 2023
 * Phase 2: WMF/Community Tech reviews and organizes proposals – Monday, Jan 30, 2023 to Friday, Feb 10, 2023
 * Phase 3: Vote on proposals – Friday, Feb 10, 2023 to Friday, Feb 24, 2023
 * Phase 4: Results posted – Tuesday, Feb 28, 2023

If you want to start writing out your ideas ahead of the Survey, you can start thinking about your proposals and draft them in the CWS sandbox.

We are grateful to all who participated last year. See you in January 2023!

Community Tech, STei (WMF) 16:44, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Movement Charter: End of the community consultation round 1

 * m:Special:MyLanguage/Movement Charter/Community Consultation/Announcement/End of Community Consultation • 

Hi everyone,

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC), we would like to thank everyone who has participated in our first community wide consultation period on the Movement Charter.

People from across the Movement shared their feedback and thoughts on the content of the Movement Charter. If you have not had the chance to share your opinion yet, you are welcome to do so still by giving the drafts a read and filling out the anonymous survey, which is accessible in 12+ languages. The survey will close on January 2, 2023. You are invited to continue to share your thoughts with the MCDC via email too: movementcharter@wikimedia.org.

What’s next?

The Movement Strategy and Governance team will publish the final report with the summary of the feedback received in January 2023. It will be shared with the MCDC and the communities via different distribution channels.

After receiving the final report, the MCDC will review the suggestions and communicate the changes by providing an explanation on how and why suggestions were or were not adopted in the next versions of the drafts. There will be additional ways to engage with the Movement Charter content in 2023, including early feedback on a proposed ratification process and new drafts of different chapters in the second quarter of 2023.

We invite you to sign-up to the MCDC monthly newsletter, it will be delivered to the Talk page of your choice. Monthly updates are available on Meta to remain updated on the progress of the MCDC.

Interested people can still sign-up to become a Movement Charter Ambassador (MC Ambassador) to support their community. The MC Ambassadors Program grant program will restart accepting applications from both individuals and groups ahead of the next round of consultations in the second quarter of 2023.

We thank you for your participation, time and effort in helping to build the Charter for our Movement!

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee,

 MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 12:47, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Functional equivalent - User Interface
Appreciate the contribution of new User Interface - in general a functional equivalent User Interface (UI) means that feature A,B,C,... in old interface in available as A,B,C, .. in a new interface.

PDF Export
PDF export in the MediaWiki is not available in Wikiversity. For learning resources created in Wikiversity used in lectures the PDF export is very, very useful in the educational context (in lectures and seminars). See MediaWiki features in Wikipedia. The removal of PDF-export feature is equivalent to the loss of for tailored books that can be annotated in the lecture or seminars e.g. with OpenSource Xournal. The in different formats for personalized books and the possibility of personlized annotations e.g. with Xournal was most amazing and brilliant feature for educational use and in educational context.


 * Special:DownloadAsPdf still exists, but only for single pages. The solution is to put the subpages together as a collection. See Student Success/Collection as one example. I'm pretty sure this could be automated with a Lua module if someone wants to write one. Module:Navigation shows how to collect subpage titles. It should be possible to use this approach to collect subpages of a parent page and include them in the current page while excluding the page itself. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:06, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you, yes Student Success/Collection is a very good example for the use-case of aggregated single pages - also the download PDF box on top in text is very good for highlighting, that students can download the aggregated course material as PDF. I guess the template modification for that box with a directly clickable PDF download in the box itself may help especially in the new UI, mobile devices or convertible with smaller screens, because the PDF export is no longer directly visible in menu left (Workflow - click Hamburger Icon top left, scroll down, find PDF option in menu list, click on PDF download, see next page, click download PDF on that page, download of PDF starts). --Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 07:53, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Cite this page
"Cite this page" is a feature to make a reference to specific version of an article or learning resource. Version Control is a core element of collaborative work (collaborative editing, software developement, collaborative mapping. A permanent link is also a static reference but not with context information. "Cite this page" feature creates consistent citations e.g. in APA-style. Having this feature of MediaWiki not available in Wikiversity is like software development with no version control numbers and release information or scientific work without the possibility to make a reference in standardized way to previous scientific work the current result is build on.


 * For educational use I would recommend to Wikiversity community to enable PDF export and "Cite this page" for learning resources in Wikiversity.
 * Anyway - may be it would be better to discuss that in the German Wikiversity/Colloquium because most of the learning resources for Universities that I use in lectures and seminars are maintained in the german Wikiversity. All the best,--Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 15:45, 23 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Special:CiteThisPage is enabled. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:07, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much, Dave, all the best for 2023, --Bert Niehaus (discuss • contribs) 07:27, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

New template for subpages
subpagesif (or Subpages/If) is a template I just made that quickly allows people to see the subpages. I place it at the bottom of the page, just above category statements. I gave it small print to minimize the esthetic impact on even the most "pretty" resource pages. One purpose is to verify whether an resource that appears to be a stub really is a stub. For example, see Transplantation. The template creates the following link:

Let me know if you have any comments or concerns.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 17:16, 26 December 2022 (UTC)