Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/June 2015

Pywikibot compat will no longer be supported - Please migrate to pywikibot core
Sorry for English, I hope someone translates this. Pywikibot (then "Pywikipediabot") was started back in 2002. In 2007 a new branch (formerly known as "rewrite", now called "core") was started from scratch using the MediaWiki API. The developers of Pywikibot have decided to stop supporting the compat version of Pywikibot due to bad performance and architectural errors that make it hard to update, compared to core. If you are using pywikibot compat it is likely your code will break due to upcoming MediaWiki API changes (e.g. T101524). It is highly recommended you migrate to the core framework. There is a migration guide, and please contact us if you have any problem.

There is an upcoming MediaWiki API breaking change that compat will not be updated for. If your bot's name is in this list, your bot will most likely break.

Thank you, The Pywikibot development team, 19:30, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Pie charts
I brought a template called "Pie chart" over from Wikipedia to use it in the resource: Gases for helium use. It in turn calls the template "Pie chart/slice" which I also brought over. But, this is what it does here:

The working one can be found in Helium. The template:Pie chart/slice appeared to call a routine template:floor, which I also brought over but no effect. Suggestions are most welcome! --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 16:54, 16 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what's wrong, but floor is not a template in this usage. It's a rounding parser function.  See mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions/en.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:42, 17 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, thanks to mw:Help:Calculation I've tested the operators: floor, #expr, and switch. All are working correctly here on Wikiversity. The problem seems to rest with "border-width". It does not return the correct arc for the pie chart. For example, a piece should be say 88 % of the pie, but it always comes back 75 %. #expr returns the correct px, but "border-width" ignores it. It's as if floor is operating beyond its bracketed limits. The additional colors and pieces of the pie never show up past the first three (by highest per centage) or fewer. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 04:49, 21 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I left a message on mediawiki about this problem with pie chart. The response was "You need to add the transborder class to MediaWiki:Common.css." The only statements in the wikipedia version which works are

/* Pie chart test: Transparent borders */

.transborder { border: solid transparent; }   border: solid #000001; filter: chroma(color=#000001); }
 * html .transborder { /* IE6 */

The /* text/* appears to be a comment statement. I will insert these into our MediaWiki:Common.css before a comment statement if anyone else is confident this will not create problems. Or, I can just try it to see what happens. Comments, criticisms, questions, and suggestions most welcome. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:26, 24 June 2015 (UTC)


 * .transborder is a specific class. The code shouldn't impact anything except content tagged with that class.  Go ahead and try it.  We can always undo.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:07, 24 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, I'll be! We now have a working pie chart template. Enjoy, one and all! --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 21:39, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Merging schools
We have a proposal on the talk page for the school of Electrical Engineering to remerge it back with the school of Electronics under the school of Electrical Engineering. While it would be great for these two schools or departments of one school to be improved, I'd like to find a novel approach for Wikiversity rather than conforming to brick and mortars or perhaps online universities. I'd also like to maximize the contributor's efforts and minimize later potential unmerging. Help, comments, suggestions, criticisms, and input would be much appreciated. What do you think? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 20:43, 16 June 2015 (UTC)


 * It's not my area of expertise, so I can't speak to combining these two specifically, although I noticed that their does seem to be some overlap between the two. But I would say that we have too many schools.  There are currently 110.  Some are clearly opportunities for consolidation.  The Category:Schools page was the 15th most popular page on Wikiversity last year, so this is a high frequency 'portal' that should be optimized for the benefit of both users and content.  After that, only 44 of the 110 schools made the top 1,000 pages.  But both Electrical engineering and Electronics are in the top 500.  Interestingly, the more popular page in this field is Topic:Electrical Engineering, which means people are less drawn to either school, but more often find the school by way of the the content.  See Statistics/2014 for details.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:36, 17 June 2015 (UTC)


 * In an effort of transparency, I'm the one who proposed this latest merger. I'll be succinct and keep the rhetoric low for why I think we should merge these two schools.


 * Moving the school of EE to a topic of the umbrella School of Engineering would match the hierarchy of the other engineering disciplines e.g. Mechanical, Civil, etc.
 * Electrical Engineering is undoubtedly the "umbrella" over which Electronics Engineering resides, not the other way around.
 * While internationally the 'Electronics Engineering' degree may be equally prevalent, it is limited to a relatively small field of study and work that utilizes electricity. I mean to say that Electrical Engineering encompasses power & energy, communications, control, instrumentation (electronics), electromagnetics, and solid state devices, among a few others.  This hierarchy would lend itself well to having an Electrical Engineering topic within the School of Engineering.
 * From this Electrical Engineering topic, of which students would start learning basics, would be further topical branches to the sub-disciplines of Electrical Engineering, namely Electronics Engineering, Power Engineering, Communications, Control, etc. that the student would then move on to after reaching "Junior" or "Senior" status.
 * It may be confusing for some students to arrive at the Electronics Engineering School to find that there is little development in the basics, yet finds that the Electrical Engineering School, as it currently stands, has well developed basics that seem to be the exact same thing. This is both redundant and an inefficient way of teaching/guiding students along the path of broad electrical engineering learning into smaller specific fields later on.


 * As a side note, there certainly does seem to be an exorbitant amount of 'Schools' listed. Many of these can be restructured under a more user-friendly hierarchy system of schools of 'Arts and Sciences', 'Engineering', etc, which is partly why I'm suggesting that there be some restructuring of the electrical and electronics current 'schools'. -- William Leismer (discuss • contribs)


 * 03:36, 17 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Just to clarify, you are suggesting that both move under School:Engineering, rather than maintain either school separately, and to then have Topic:Electrical engineering and Topic:Electronics? That makes sense to me.  I'm somewhat concerned about Electronics as a career field being lost under Engineering.  I'd be inclined to also list Electronics under School:Technology or similar.  But after looking at School:Technology, I decided against that for now.  The schools need cleaning up. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 22:25, 17 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's essentially what I'm proposing. Electronics Engineering seems to be a particularly difficult discipline to categorize because of the many different meanings it takes on for different people.  To some, Electronics Engineering is the same as Electrical Engineering; to others, it's merely a trade profession that technically wouldn't even fall under the realm of Engineering.  I personally feel that it does deserve its own topic under the more general topic of Electrical Engineering, and the fact that my governing body, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has kept its historical title leads me to definitely want to keep this topic alive and well, just sorted more appropriately within the right school and topic. -- William Leismer (discuss • contribs) 01:55, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * While I feel like I'm tossing in a banana among the apples and oranges, I wanted to mention that Electronics, a course on the electrical components, sometimes is a field actually under Physics in part because of the search for novel properties (e.g., superconductivity) and structures (transistors) using advanced materials (like diamond). This sidelight could be handled as Electronics/Courses, Electronics/Physics, Electronics/Devices, and Electronics/Materials, perhaps under Physics or under Engineering. Papers on each of the fields have been published in IEEE journals and conference proceedings, as well as in Physics and Materials Science journals and proceedings. But where to put the beginnings? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 04:01, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I think they are separate issues. If I understand correctly, you're looking at courses rather than school/topic organization.  There's no reason the Physics and astronomy school couldn't have a link to Topic:Electronics.  To me, the courses themselves would be Electronics/Materials and Electronics/Devices.  Electronics/Courses is something that would be under Topic:Electronics.  I don't know enough about the content to say whether Electronics/Physics or Physics/Electronics makes more sense.  It may depend on the perspective of the course.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 04:21, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I would have to agree with Dave. This issue is separate from the organization of the schools, but Marshallsumter's point is good to talk about.  Electronics and Physics overlap especially when you start talking about 'Solid State Devices' used in electronics and the 'Solid State Physics' that are necessary to research/develop these devices.  Electronics, nowadays, spans such a wide spectrum of devices, but analysis can be done at many different levels, some of which don't even really consider solid state physics.  So, I'll agree with Dave and suggest that we deal with those linkings based upon the perspective of the course.  Necessarily, a physics department will offer courses that delve deep into the theory of solid state physics for development of solid state devices, so some linking may be made to the Electronics for reference, but much of the material can be developed and stay under the Physics.  When teaching on electronics, we typically mention the basics of solid state physics, only enough to initially allow a student in electrical engineering to move beyond the nano-meter scale up to the millimeter scale of circuit creation, testing, and development with said solid state devices.


 * TL;DR - Solid State Physics courses should stay under the umbrella Physics with some references to Electronics where necessary for clarification/forward looking learning. Solid State Device courses that focus on circuit design and analysis should stay under the umbrella Electronics with some references to Physics if the student requires deeper understanding of the nano-meter scale atomic inner-workings. -- William Leismer (discuss • contribs) 16:56, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

HTTPS
Hi everyone.

Over the last few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working towards enabling HTTPS by default for all users, including unregistered ones, for better privacy and security for both readers and editors. This has taken a long time, as there were different aspects to take into account. Our servers haven't been ready to handle it. The Wikimedia Foundation has had to balance sometimes conflicting goals.

Forced HTTPS has just been implemented on all Wikimedia projects. Some of you might already be aware of this, as a few Wikipedia language versions were converted to HTTPS last week and the then affected communities were notified.

Most of Wikimedia editors shouldn't be affected at all. If you edit as registered user, you've probably already had to log in through HTTPS. We'll keep an eye on this to make sure everything is working as it should. Do get in touch with us if you have any problems after this change or contact me if you have any other questions.

/Johan (WMF) 22:00, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

PlanetPhysics
PlanetPhysics (PlanetPhysics) was a physics-related website/wiki that was active until maybe four years ago. The site has since disappeared, but User:GangofOne had a backup of the website from 2011 and provided it to me off-wiki about a month ago. The backup contains a copy of each of the 828 wiki pages in two formats: HTML and TEX. The HTML would be perfect for restoring to a website, but it is not useful as wikitext because of the extensive use of images to display the math formulas used on each page. With images, the 828 pages becomes 20,691 items, including folders. So, the only practical use from our standpoint would be the TEX (LaTeX) content.

I have researched and experimented with a variety of TeX to Wikitext converters and found one that makes most of the pages mostly legible. Some pages are fine. Others end up with citation errors or other unrecognized and/or unconverted TEX commands. I've now put in almost two days of effort trying to improve the conversion script and I'm at the point where I can't spare any more time on this. So, I'm asking the community for direction.

I can use a bot to upload the content as converted. There would be a PlanetPhysics learning project with 828 subpages. Someone would need to look at the content, decide if there is any value to it, and then clean up or otherwise edit based on what is available. I would upload the TEX content to the corresponding Talk page for each page. This is necessary both as a license reference of who created the original content, and also as a resource to try and decipher any errors in the conversion process.

Or, I can let this project go, and encourage User:GangofOne to find a website to restore the content to. That would be a straight FTP upload and done, fully functional, but it wouldn't be here. So, what does the community say? Is anyone willing to step up and take responsibility for this content once it is uploaded? It instantly becomes our largest learning project, and increases the size of the main space wiki by almost 5%. The value will be minimal without a curator.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:35, 25 June 2015 (UTC)


 * The physics department has only a few active participants at present. Depending on the number of subpages needing fix-up, the effort to have PlanetPhysics fully functional may take a couple of years. I'll be happy to do what I can to that end. Hopefully, some of the physics project at Wikipedia may enjoy coming here to help. Ultimately, the final decision rests with User:GangofOne. We'd be happy to have it here. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 25 June 2015 (UTC)


 * PlanetPhysics content is now imported. 828 subpages.  There's a limit to how many subpages can be listed at once, so the page only shows the first (200?).  You'll see that pages need to be cleaned up, renamed, etc.  If you find there's a standard set of things that should be cleaned up across all pages, post it on Talk:PlanetPhysics and I can look at having the bot clean all pages at once if there's a simple rule for what it needs to do.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:05, 26 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I looked at the following pages, selected because they seemed like undergraduate college physics topics: Talk:PlanetPhysics/AlbertEinstein       Talk:PlanetPhysics/Acceleration       Talk:PlanetPhysics/CapacitorNetworks       Talk:PlanetPhysics/ComptonEffect       Talk:PlanetPhysics/FirstLawOfThermodynamics


 * My proficiency in reading Latex is only moderate, but what I saw looks like a parallel effort to Wikiverstiy: The PlanePhysics pages seemed to be "starts", sketchy introductions that require more content in order to become useful. In this way PlanetPhysics and Wikiversity are quite similar. Two differences between Wikiversity and PlanetPhysics are worth noting: (1) While I  fully endorse Wikiversity's policy of encouraging student efforts, one consequence is that many Wikiversity pages are of low value or quality.  In contrast, ALL of the PLanetPhysics pages seemed to be of good quality (though not very useful until material is added). (2) Dave Braunschweig estimates the content of PlanetPhysics to be 5% of the main space wiki.  If "main space wiki" refers to all of Wikipedia, then the total content of PlanetPhysics is much larger than the content of physics and astronomy articles on Wikiversity.


 * Conclusion: I believe that we have three equally viable options:
 * Plan A: Find a Latex/html host that revives PlanetPhysics in its current form. This would be good for PlanetPhysics, and not particularly bad for Wikiversity because competition among open source efforts is good for all concerned. This is in contrast to commercial ventures where competition is good for the whole but bad for the individual competitors.  (Footnote:With  CC-by  licensing, all these "competitors" credit each other in one glorious effort!)
 * Plan B: Use a bot to translate PlanetPhysics into Wikiversity wikitext pages. I don't think the extra clutter damages Wikiversity because quality pages can be reached by search engines (i.e. Google).  But it would be a waste of time to expend great human effort on this translation from Latex to wikitext.
 * Plan C: Do nothing, except store PlanetPhysics on Wikiversity or somewhere else. This is the path to choose if no bot exists to implement plan B at the moment.


 * The only thing I don't recommend is laboriously translating all these pages by hand from Latex to Wikitext. Most editors looking for ideas can probably just skim the Latex and glean enough information to rewrite as wikitext--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 27 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Everything is imported. According to, we now have 29,537 articles.  So, PlanetPhysics is almost 3% of the total.  It was already translated based on the best bot I could find.  Additional bot cleanup is possible as recommendations are discovered/made.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:59, 27 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I've begun working on some of the PlanetPhysics resources. One that is finished is PlanetPhysics/Fresnel integrals. When a bot removes the empty math calls a lot of the expressions will become clear on the other resources. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 23:03, 27 June 2015 (UTC)