Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/October 2014

A question about wikimedia images
For some time I have had a hypothetical question about changing images that is now very real. When you change an article on Wikipedia or Wikiversity the change appears on people's watchlists, which ensures quality control. But what happens if someone changes an image? I have upgraded one or two images, but always verified that all pages using the image would benefit.

But now it has occurred to me that images could be upgraded by students. The example I am thinking about is this project. It calls on students to make a drawing. Each semester, students could improve the drawing until it eventually becomes worthy for others to use. I have a drawing I could upload to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page right now, but it will need to be replaced. Will multiple upgrades to an image bother these people?--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 16:47, 30 September 2014 (UTC)


 * This is just a thought, but you could upload here to Wikiversity, choose non-commercial fair-use, and each figure uploaded remains copyrighted to you or the student. Commons only accepts licenses similar to the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL which your students might object to because they are in effect surrendering the image (they always own the copyright) to commercial exploitation. Also, if any complain later that they were forced to put the image on as part of the course/project, since each contribution is copyrighted, they automatically can delete without any hassle. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 23:06, 30 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I think I will do that, but for an entirely different reason. As a matter of policy one should refrain from downloading images that are likely to change onto a server that large numbers of people will potentially want to use. --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 01:13, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Simplify Beginner's Tutorials will multiply Wikiversity active participants
Hello everyone! I hope to be correct in posting this suggestion in the beginning of page. I'm a Junior Wikiversity Writer (that is inexpert). I'm also italian so excuse my possible grammatical errors. I've thinked this: "If there is a great place where many people want to get there, but entries are too difficult, long, etc, happens that the majority of them retire". Now, Wikiversity is a very great place! More people come to participate, more this place became fantastic! Beautiful! Dreamful! Useful! Thence, entries are helping pages! I propose to create one page, short and summarized, in which a new user can learn quickly basic formatting language and page sections (Edit, Read, Discuss, History), then a briefly introduction on what Wikiversity is, etc All of this page, of course, must contain wikilinks to go in depth pages. Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 22:21, 3 October 2014 (UTC)


 * What did you think of our Guided tours? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 22:31, 3 October 2014 (UTC)


 * It give an overview of what Wikiversity is, what everyone can do, but is a bit dispersive! There is too text only for introducing! And finally, there isn't a link to a complete page in which anyone can get basic skills on editing pages!
 * I propose these tasks:
 * 1) Optimize Introduction Tour you linked me above
 * 2) It must be highlighted, easily reachable, because in the help page newcomers get lost!
 * 3) It need containing links to study in deep anything (Code of conduct, Copyright, Participate to community, etc)
 * 4) Finally, there must be a link to a page which contains basic skills on editing, and this one need to be complete!
 * 5) The editing page has to have links to study in deep anyother editing skills (templates, commons, etc)
 * Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 16:30, 4 October 2014 (UTC)


 * This is why I wrote this tutorial: Help:Writing a technical_article RandyRostie (discuss • contribs) 23:33, 4 October 2014 (UTC)


 * But it is incomplete! A newcomer, after having read all of this is however unskilled to editing, almost basically, any resource!
 * I've thinked this:
 * 1) Complete this article above on editing, at least with basic skills
 * 2) Insert it into the introducing tour above linked me
 * 3) Optimize that tour (less text, more content)
 * What do you think?
 * Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 18:30, 5 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I may seem boring, or inexpert for suggest this. But is just a inexpert that know what are the problems of newcomers, an example: what can know of mediawiki software, bugzilla, ecc who doesn't work in IT sector? Such as scientists, lawyers, biologists, doctors, economists? They probably will get lost! In front of what you aren't able to understand, you don't know if jump it is possible or not! So indecision cause waste of time, and for many people (just who might put too much good content) time is costly! If be successful to contribute at wikiversity take a lot of time, just these important people can't do it!
 * However, my question may be a bit senseless, if yes someone is free to persuade me.
 * Moreover, I may be wrong!
 * Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 21:27, 5 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Be bold! If you can make Wikiversity better, go for it.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:42, 5 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you! I'll do my best! -- Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 14:11, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

I've created this page: Quick start, and I've put it in the Main Help page, at the beginning of Wikiversity Help Contents paragraph. With this page, I'm sure that everyone come the first time to Wikiversity will be able to edit pages in few minutes just reading this one! Everyone should start from here. In this page, I (or anyone) will put links to other tours of Wikiversity. So, this page, also will provide an Overview of Wikiversity with links for every further information, tours, articles. I hope all of you appreciate my idea and collaborate. Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 08:02, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

I concur
I just joined up to Wikiversity as I want to start contributing to the Accounting/Finance field and I have found that the information to do so is very disorganized. There are a ton of posts that I have read but that are spewed all over the site. I feel like people keep coming with an idea like a "Quick Guide" and then just draft one up without thinking about the current sitemap. So there are like 10 different "Quick Guides" that all have different information in them and all link to different places. The guides to getting started need to be consolidated into fewer wikis that are broken down into the type of users in a more intuitively flowing manner. A sitemap would be very helpful organizing this I think. I would love to help out in this regard if others agree.

--ttam (discuss • contribs) 00:01, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * What needs to be organized for newcomers is going to be much more obvious to you than it is to those of us who have been around awhile (and navigated our way through those 10 different quick guides). Pick something and make it better.  Pages can be consolidated, but it's important that it be done the right way so that those who made the original contributions are credited for their work.  If you want to combine some pages, let us know which ones so we can advise you on the best way to go about it.  --  Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:14, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with you. But maybe I haven't understood well how your idea of a sitemap. I think that Quick Start is the best Quick Guide, but a little uncomplete, especially about links! So this structure of links that breaks down should be put there.
 * I've inserted this page in the Help:Contents page, as you can see, but it should be put in the Welcome Paragraph of the Wikiversity Main Page together with the other two. I leave you this job, that require more skills on Wiki. Dave Braunschweig certainly know what is the right thing to do. --Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 20:58, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The WMF's "Wikipedia editing basics" playlist on youtube may be of interest - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx9pX-VnGVjAVQo8Qv_ohNP5r7JuzhRo -- Jtneill - Talk - c 06:30, 20 October 20 --Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 18:51, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
 * If you think this of it, just put a link in Quick start.
 * But I think Wikipedia Formatting Basics is already in Wikipedia Helping Pages themselves, so the necessity is just a few links in the Quick start page.
 * Now the question is clarify and simplify Wikiversity philosophy, communities, structure, patterns of create learning materials, etc and give everyone a simplified overview in the Quick start page, through links well organized, such as in the manner proposed by ttam above. --Nenomaz (discuss • contribs) 18:51, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Red-linked categories
When I uploaded and supplied licensing information for File:Stauning's Alps E Greenland.jpg, the following appeared in the categories list at the bottom:


 * Category:Files with no machine-readable license, Category:Files with no machine-readable description Category:Files with no machine-readable author, and Category:Files with no machine-readable source.


 * Anyone know what's going on? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:51, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * It came with the update to MediaWiki 1.23.5. See MediaWiki 1.23 for release notes, and specifically Tracking categories for the explanation of these categories.  That then leads to Commons:Commons:Machine-readable_data for the details.  It's going to take more reading from there to see what changes we need to make in what templates to make the tracking categories happy.  What I would recommend is to see what new files we have that don't have those categories and see what's different.  Otherwise, do the same thing on either Wikipedia or on Commons.  With enough comparisons it should become clear what makes the categories appear and what we do to correct the problem.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:08, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * So far on commons these four categories are not displayed at the bottom of the file page, nor are they hidden categories. But, when entered into "search", they exist with anywhere from 1,000 files on up. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 16:00, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * It looks like Commons has those added as hidden categories. You might consider creating those four categories here and defining them as hidden.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:17, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'll give it a try. I entered Category:Files with no machine-readable license into "search" on Wikipedia and they claim "Wikipedia does not have a category with this exact name." But, the category has 16 files which do have it as a red-link at the page bottom. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 21:12, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I tried the first one Category:Files with no machine-readable license but it still shows up at the page bottom even though it is now listed in Category:Hidden categories. I'll do some more poking around. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 21:26, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * See mw:Help:Categories. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:39, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Good idea! Their magic command worked. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:19, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

MOOC Module and course interface for wikiversity and common.js
hey everyone I would like to get some feedback from the community on this very topic started by User:Sebschlicht We invested quite some developement time (about 4 month) which by itself is not a justification for making the stuff public. But getting no feedback at all is a little frustrating. especially because our lecture will start soon and the students need our javascripts deployed.

What is possible with the new javascripts and lua-scripts is to make courses on topics with a click and point experience and also have a easy user interface for learners. you can check then out as descriped by User:sebschlicht on the talk page Wikiversity_talk:Colloquium

Thanks for reading through this stuff (: --Renepick (discuss • contribs) 14:28, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Is it possible for us to see a simple demonstration of your efforts without us having to install anything ourselves? Could you do a quick screen-cast capture we could view, or some other type of demonstration that would allow us to more easily evaluate the request?  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:41, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The problem is I was sick in hospital over the last 5 weeks and lectures start on Tuesday oct 28th. I probably cannot do a nice screencast with high audio quality till then since I am lacking equipment. I did a small screencast with low quality right now. The first 3 minutes demonstrate functionality and the last 6 minutes give a short explaination of how we did this. For our students it would be a much nicer learning experience if they did not have to register an account and create common.js in their user space. So for your reference what you could do is to copy User:Renepick/common.js to your common.js and then visit a page like Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/Ethernet/Collision_detection. You can also visit the pages with and without the common.js as you can see the content will also work without javascript but it is being displayed in a much more boring way and it is much harder to interact / edit the content when you are an unexperienced mediawiki user.




 * I know it is a different community and process but It might help you to make a decision to know that 3 days before my accident I was in the officies of Wikimedia Germany and they have been very impressed by our frontend and said that they would like us to develop it as a mediawikiextension so that it can be easier deployed via mediawiki installations in various language versions. Our current plan is to do this but for the current course it would be really great if we at least had the scripts installed on the english wikiversity so that users can access them without barrier.
 * For security: As I have stated in the video in common.js we create a resource loader so any page that contains a hidden div with a certain id can contain information on which javascripts should be loaded. this is necessary so that our code is not invoked on every page load but just on MOOC pages. To make the system secure we currently only allow javascript from User:sebschlicht namespace but after complete deployment we would of course change this to Mediawiki:common.js/... namespace. So this means that theoretically user:sebschlicht could secretly deploy malicious javascript code into the english wikiversity. I think this should not be a problem since we can see from his developer history that he did not do anything bad here and he can be monitored as all admins that could deploy javascript code should also be monitored. --Renepick (discuss • contribs) 09:57, 25 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I am also very impressed by your efforts and would like to see it developed as a MediaWiki extension. But that's a completely different discussion than adding the current content to MediaWiki:Common.js.  To support the current request, I have created a page at MOOC Interface and will post an announcement to encourage community involvement.  Please review MOOC Interface and correct anything I might have misunderstood, and add any supporting comments you wish there.  Thanks!  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:51, 25 October 2014 (UTC)


 * thanks for starting this process. I am aware of the fact that my request and the roadmap with the mediawikiextension are two different things. Since the extension would first have to be developed and second have to be deployed I was making the current request. Anyway I am curious to see what will happen. Thanks again for your support. --Renepick (discuss • contribs) 14:23, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia copies
So far using Random I've come across 32 Wikipedia copies where for the time stamp some significant per cent of a Wikipedia entry has been copied over to Wikiversity. In the case of ice cores and glaciers I am happy to convert them to Wikiversity resources. But, that leaves 30 (so far) that have been sitting over here sometimes for as long as seven years. What would the community like to do with these if anything? --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 03:01, 13 October 2014 (UTC)


 * There is a template that can be applied to these.  That could be combined with a  if there's no clear value beyond what is already available at Wikipedia.  You could even tag them for speedy deletion as no educational objectives or discussion in history, but that may be a bit hasty for an article that's been here for seven years.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:08, 13 October 2014 (UTC)


 * See comment at Talk:Torque_and_angular_acceleration--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 13:12, 25 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Good idea and great presentation! I don't believe there would be a reason to delete this one. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 17:37, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Suicide Learning Project
A discussion regarding the scope of the Suicide learning project has been started at Talk:Suicide. There seem to be strong opinions on both sides as to what level of detail should be included in the project. That talk page is an effort to gain consensus on the level of detail the community is comfortable with before additional content is added to the project. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:37, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Meta RfCs on two new global groups
Hello all,

There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would not contain any additional user rights. That proposal can be found at Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.

We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.

It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at Stewards' noticeboard.

Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 18:04, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

I have responded to the first proposal at meta as follows:
 * Most of the arguments above for having this are good ones. But there is one likely major problem. "In addition to general question/answer-type correspondence, a portion of OTRS is dedicated to handling copyright and licensing permissions." With respect to commercial-free licenses, I believe the OTRS volunteers do an outstanding job. But, having a global group that is "dedicated to handling copyright and licensing permissions" may mean they decide "Fair Use" images. Whether a project opts in or opts out requires that a local consensus be sought where none right now is necessary. I do not believe any group of volunteers no matter how well meaning should be deciding anything about "Fair Use" images. While such images are not allowed on commons they occur with great frequency on Wikipedia and Wikiversity.
 * On a secondary note, images already designated as Public Domain on commons are often deleted for any reason, often inappropriately. OTRS volunteers do not review or act to preserve these images. I would not want any such group of volunteers going through "Fair Use" NASA images to declare them PD, sent up to commons, only to have them deleted, and the uploader then has to re-upload them. --Marshallsumter (talk) 21:26, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

IMPORTANT: Admin activity review
Hello. A new policy regarding the removal of "advanced rights" (administrator, bureaucrat, etc) was recently adopted by global community consensus (your community received a notice about the discussion). According to this policy, the stewards are reviewing administrators' activity on smaller wikis. To the best of our knowledge, your wiki does not have a formal process for removing "advanced rights" from inactive accounts. This means that the stewards will take care of this according to the new admin activity review here. We have determined that the following users meet the inactivity criteria (no edits and no log actions for more than 2 years):
 * 1) Cormaggio (admin, bureaucrat)
 * 2) Digitalme (admin)
 * 3) Draicone (admin)
 * 4) J.Steinbock (admin)
 * 5) La comadreja (admin)
 * 6) McCormack (admin)
 * 7) MichaelBillington (admin)
 * 8) Rayc last log (admin)
 * 9) Robert Horning (admin)
 * 10) Sebmol (admin, bureaucrat)
 * 11) Trinity507 (admin)

These users will receive a notification soon, asking them to start a community discussion if they want to retain some or all of their rights. If the users do not respond, then their advanced rights will be removed by the stewards.

However, if you as a community would like to create your own activity review process superseding the global one, want to make another decision about these inactive rights holders, or already have a policy that we missed, then please notify the stewards on Meta-Wiki so that we know not to proceed with the rights review on your wiki. Thanks, --MF-Warburg (discuss • contribs) 23:56, 30 October 2014 (UTC)