Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/July 2009

New mediawiki skin
A new skin, called "Vector", is available for testing (go to Special:Preferences). This is a fruit of the Wikimedia Usability Project. More information here. ---- (profile | chit chat | email) 23:01, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

VB 6 Course
--DaveFairhall 15:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)I was following the VB6 tutorial course. But when I arrived at the Lesson page called "Event-Drien Design in VB6" it just ends and there are no more lesson links! Just a link to a computer programming Page which seems to bear no resemblance to the course I was on!!

Can anybody help??

DaveFairhall 15:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Wikiversity is still very much a work in progress, as you seem to have found out. If you post a URL, I can take a peek and see where the course ends.
 * Since WV is a volunteer effort, it's important to get feedback on Learning Resources. It's the only way to know what needs work, what does work and in this case, what's missing. Historybuff 17:42, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi,

Thank you for your speedy response. The page in question is :-http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Event-Driven_Design_in_VB6

DaveFairhall 08:41, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Gets $300K for Wikimedia Commons
To improve usability - good: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikimedia_foundation_gets_300k_for_wikimedia_commo.php -- Jtneill - Talk - c 10:11, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

license update
With the implementation of the license update we now have a number of pages that contain outdated or incorrect information. In particular Copyrights but there are also a number of other pages that need to be proofread and changed. I'm not entirely clear on the terms of the new license and the transitition so I'd like to discuss what is needed before proceeding. --mikeu talk 12:10, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

WV teamwork
I'd like to draw attention to Web 2.0 as a great example of collaborative editing here at Wikiversity. There were 10 participants who made great strides in improving this learning resource. See the difference. Another example is Introduction to the Dutch language diff with 4 participants. I'm bringing this up here to start a dicussion thread on how we can encourage and foster more cooperatively developed learning resources. --mikeu talk 19:03, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Just like the clueless one said! We will create the content! CQ 19:55, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

most wanted
According to page hit statistics Principles of Management was the most viewed mainspace page during June, and it ranked #27 for the year. Stream/Circle was the #6 most viewed page for 2009 with an average of 406 hits/day, which is kind of ironic given that it was (mostly) page blanked from February until just today. --mikeu talk 20:10, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Mu301: mikeu and jtneill
I've been watching these guys.. following them around.

I think I've even rattled their cage.

Sbs:Iii: Candidates for Custodianship is a masterpiece.

Time has shown me that v: is resilient.. stable.. civilized. Even helpful.

I know I've posted my share of red link vaporwarish nonesense, but I think there is a method to all of this madness.

CQ 06:51, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Firefox 3.5 and Wikiversity
I've just suggested an optimization for Wikiversity talk:Introduction edit. --JackPotte 20:47, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

file uploads disabled
One of the wikimedia servers has been having problems recently which is currently being fixed. "Uploading and generation of new thumb[nail images] will be temporarily disabled on Wikimedia sites" for a short time while these problems are resolved. The plan is for the work to be completed by 22:00 UTC or so. --mikeu talk 21:21, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * This should be fixed now. --mikeu talk 22:04, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

It seems the problems have not been completely fixed. This has been a recurring problem recently. For updates on the Wikimedia server status, please visit: http://techblog.wikimedia.org --mikeu talk 01:12, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikiversity on Twitter
Follow. Contribute. http://twitter.com/Wikiversity -- Jtneill - Talk - c 10:12, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Also see the testing that we are doing on the Sandbox Server which includes the Wikiversity Twitter RSS feed in a page. --mikeu talk 15:23, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

The Hunting of the Snark
Project proposal: Research on Henry Holiday's illustrations in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark --Snark 18:12, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

about MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning
delete the text in order to confirm the change of licenses given by the foundation and keep the mediawiki-core-system-message.Crochet.david 10:33, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Fair Use
Is fair use is accepted in en.wikiversity or not? Can it be acceptable in beta.wikiversity? --Zepelin 14:19, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Can you be more specific, Zep? If you're talking about for images and files, I suggest looking for what you really need on the Wikimedia Commons, since everything there can be linked from Wikiversity anyway. The commons has a quicker more strict policy, so licensing and fair use issues have a larger community dealing with them. Another reason to connect at the Commons first is that we've been deleting redundant resources. Does that help? --CQ 16:27, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you for kind reply. I hope to use Commons of course, but book covers or CD covers are banned in commons, but OK in en.wikipedia. And I need to use book cover image to show in beta.wikiversity (now I'm incubating ko.wikiversity in beta). So I hope to know the fair use policy in wikiversity, especially en.wikiversity. --Zepelin 01:32, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. Fair use and this are all we have so far here at en.wikiversity.org and they relate to US laws. Whatever you do in beta should probably reflect the ko.wikiversity.org site as much as possible so you might want to take a look at this and this. I like the old saying "It's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission." If the book covers help your content and your intentions are "fair" to the book publishers, I don't see much of a problem. The objective is to "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free content license..." so read Avoid copyright paranoia and then go for it. --CQ 03:49, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I see. Sadly ko.wikipedia is following S.Korea laws and fair use is still banned. I don't understand why en.wikipedia is following US laws(not UK / Ireland / Canada / Singapore and so on). Relations of copyright laws in Internet Era and country/language are complexed problem, I think. Anyway I'll follow the ko.wikipedia anyway. Thank you CQ. --Zepelin 09:01, 25 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The English projects follow US law because the wikimedia servers are located in the US. Other language projects might limit what is allowed further in order to be compatible with the laws of a country where the language is natively used by the majority in order that the majority of natives might be able to use the work without legal problems. WMF policy allows works under fair use, fair dealings and other similar terms of countries under certain conditions while allowing individual projects to either forbid them completely or restricting under what conditions they can be allowed further. -- dark lama  12:03, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

re-read Image copyright
Can someone re-read the template to find errors in spelling and grammar. Thanks. Crochet.david 09:25, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I found no obvious errors in spelling and grammar, but can it be simplified? If you can program a bot, it seems like you could automate some help getting information into a file description. I wish I knew how to write a script or program a bot. (I'm being facetious) Can you help at Templates? --CQ 06:27, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

OER Search Discovery
"Open Educational Resources are a little tough to really define to everyone’s satisfaction, but we can defer the details. :) We’re generally talking about pedagogical materials (something that could be put to use in the classroom to teach students) available under some sort of open content license."

"On the content creation side, we can provide more ways to add useful metadata to our pages, making it easier for teachers and students searching through educational-themed portals to find them. MediaWiki already provides basic language and license information, but projects like WikiBooks and wikiversity (as well as other MediaWiki users like WikiEducator) could definitely benefit from a consistent way to specify the subject and target audience of lesson modules."

Read more at techblog.wikimedia.org

--mikeu talk 13:58, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
 * On a related note, I'm looking for participants here at Wikiversity, at WikiEducator and at Google's knol site who wish to develop Geography learning objects that play off of shared google maps. See Introduction to Learning Objects for an overview and some discussion about metadata. --CQ 14:00, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * OK. I updated OER Commons and Talk:OER Commons to include the recent discoveries we've been talking about here and below. --CQ 21:26, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Election Notice
Ladies and Gentlemen,

As you may be aware, there is concern that the site notices regarding submission of candidacy for the Board of Trustees election were not seen anywhere but Meta after the 11th of this month. Because of the potentially massive consequence of this, and to encourage a full and active election, the election committee has determined that:

- Candidacies will be accepted through July 27th at 23:59 (UTC)

- The period for questioning candidates begins immediately. Candidates that are "late to the party" will, no doubt, be scrutinized by the community. The Committee hopes that the community will work to actively ensure that all candidates receive equivalent questioning.

- The dates of election will not change. The election will begin on 28 July and end on 10 August.

Please know that we recognize the radical nature of altering the schedule in the midst of the election and would not do it if we did not absolutely believe that there was a possibility that others may be interested and qualified and may not have known about the key dates.

For the committee, Philippe 09:20, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * FYI: The main page for the elections is: 2009 elections to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. --mikeu talk 10:44, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The voting begins 28 July. To vote there are minimum requirements for having at least 600 edits before 1 June 2009 and at least 50 edits made between 1 January - 1 July 2009.  See information for voters for details.  Once the voting starts you should go the wikimedia project where you are most active and use Special:Securepoll to vote.  Feel free to ask here if you have any questions.  --mikeu talk 23:48, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Strategic Planning
The Wikimedia Foundation has begun a year long phase of strategic planning. During this time of planning, members of the community have the opportunity to propose ideas, ask questions, and help to chart the future of the Foundation. In order to create as centralized an area as possible for these discussions, the Strategy Wiki has been launched. This wiki will provide an overview of the strategic planning process and ways to get involved, including just a few questions that everyone can answer. All ideas are welcome, and everyone is invited to participate.

Please take a few moments to check out the strategy wiki. It is being translated into as many languages as possible now; feel free to leave your messages in your native language and we will have them translated (but, in case of any doubt, let us know what language it is, if not English!).

All proposals for the Wikimedia Foundation may be left in any language as well.

Please, take the time to join in this exciting process. The importance of your participation can not be overstated.

--Philippe

(please cross-post widely and forgive those who do)
 * Is it possible to get Wikiversity mapped into the interwiki map? That would be handy especially for translation efforts. Is there an interwiki link shortcut for strategy.wikimedia.org yet? CQ 21:16, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Created/added link to this new wiki at Strategy. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:02, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * The process is interesting. I hinted at Strategy at the Village Pump there. CQ 01:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

User:Sfan00_IMG/Wikiversity_All_Subject_Original_Research_Desk
I'd started a page with some possible ideas for research projects Wikiversity contributors too could help guide or advise on.

Any thoughts? Sfan00 IMG 15:12, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

http://discovered.creativecommons.org
I was a bit disappointed due to the incompleteness of Wikiversity results listed in http://discovered.creativecommons.org. I've emailed about this via their feedback link. Others might consider doing the same - do your favourite WV resources show in the DiscoverEd search? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 10:31, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikiversity content for the most part is "not ready for primetime" anyway. That is, of course, my opinion, and subject to debate. WikiEducator does a whole lot better on the CC-OER search. Even adding "wikiversity" to the search term doesn't help. At least our "Bloom Clock" did OK ranking second. I think our Technical writing and Web design units are pretty good, but they don't show at all. Even searching "technical writing wikiversity" yields this and "web design wikiversity" yields this.


 * My disappointment is in Wikiversity's development as a learning community with all of the resources it began with as a promising part of Wikimedia. Quality must improve or Wikiversity doesn't stand a chance. Discipline on the part of contributors and dialogue as a community in my judgment are severely deficient. Merit (and search engine positioning) has to be earned through concerted effort. --CQ 13:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually the first reference to the bloom clock is also a link to Wikiversity ;-). The quality issue is a big one, of course, but at least part of the solution (IMO) would involve clearing out a lot of the abandoned stubs and then working to organize the more promising content. We were making headway a year ago on that task, but the most active contributor to the effort (McCormack) left the project, and I'm not sure whether he left any notes about the structure of that reorganization. --SB_Johnny talk 15:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 * "learning community" gets a token link on the main page, then 99% of the main page is an attempt to pretend that Wikiversity is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has always enforced the rule that the Wikipedia project is about its article content and that Wikipedia is not about its participants. Wikiversity needs to put its participants first and promote the "learn by doing" approach that Wikiversity was founded on. CQ: if you want a viable Wikiversity learning community then we should start by dumping the current Wikiversity main page. --JWSchmidt 15:57, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
 * re "dumping the main page" - we could have a separate thread/discussion about this - maybe create some alternatives? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 03:16, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Among other things these comments relate to an interesting dilemma - is a good WV resource one that is "complete" and high quality - or could it be one that it is rather "incomplete" and inviting of active participation? I suspect and hope WV is about both these options and more. DiscoverEd is beta and could do with input - hopefully it could do a better crawl of WV (e.g., I searched for some of our "complete" and "quality" resources and didn't find them listed) and then hopefully it could have a useful ranking algorithm to approximately reflect relevance/quality in comparison to other OERs. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 03:07, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Do we know how they're calculating? I.e., is it the amount of content, the amount of contributors, length of time? We also have a couple of projects that are in some ways largish but are exclusively in the user namespace. --SB_Johnny talk 09:07, 24 July 2009 (UTC)


 * CC-OER-search is Nutch and is open source. Have a look at the Nutch FAQ. It gets more technical as it goes and links out to all sorts of tasty morsels. The FAQ is a little outdated so some of the links are 404s but the devs have provided a nice overview here. If you want to delve, follow the hints, such as the Lucene Similarity class. --CQ 11:55, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

"Where do the results come from?" "Results come from institutional and third party repositories who have expended time and resources curating the metadata. These curators either create or aggregate educational resources and maintain information about them." 


 * For example: Astronomy Project likely shows up at #2 on a search for Wikiversity on DiscoverED because somebody entered metadata here at OER Commons. The #1 hit is Storyboard Artwork Project which has metadata here and the Bloom clock is here. All those OER Commons pages are feeding to DiscoverED; they are not crawling our site like Google.  You might want to take a closer look at my post above about OER Search Discovery.  The DiscoverED site is not likely to include results from wv unless we have metadata on our server, or somebody else creates metadata about our learning resources somewhere else.  --mikeu talk 04:29, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I received an email reply to my query: " The issue has been logged at http://code.creativecommons.org/issues under the DiscoverEd category. Please let us know any future issues you may discover. Also, if you have any inclusion requests regarding missing feeds, feel free to add them to http://www.oerfeeds.info/." -- Jtneill - Talk - c 23:25, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I received further reply that Wikiversity is not providing a suitable feed - does this make sense to anyone? How can we provide a suitable feed? http://code.creativecommons.org/issues/issue370 -- Jtneill - Talk - c 15:02, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
 * We need to submit OPML formatted feed(s): http://www.oerfeeds.info -- Jtneill - Talk - c 15:08, 1 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh. hey. lookie! There's a Browse: Collection: Wikiversity page with the whole ball of wikiversity wax. --CQ 05:27, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Apology
I make a full and honest apology to the wikimedia community for my kick-ass stupidity. Maybe I'm banned across Wikimedia. But I certainly was on Wikiquote, wikisource and wikibooks! Apologies to everyone. --Poetlister 2BY24 16:27, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

I accept your apologies =) --195.229.242.58 17:31, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

What did you do? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 23:28, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * See w:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-09-15/Poetlister. The person making the comment is almost certainly not Poetlister.--SB_Johnny talk 08:31, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

I accept it, now you need to do something to me for the acceptance. Enlil Ninlil 06:03, 14 August 2009 (UTC)