Wikiversity:Portal reform

Introduction
If you try to list Wikiversity portals like this, it isn't very helpful. The following is a list of current portals on Wikiversity, together with comments and reform proposals. (Date: 12th May 2008).

Voting and comment

 * Merge Portal:Plant Sciences with School:Plant sciences --Gbaor 12:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Move Portal:Life Sciences to Portal:Life sciences - naming conventions. The existing redirect should be deleted first. --Gbaor 12:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Pages linking to Portal:Sociology and Portal:Thought have been tidied up, thus these redirects could be deleted. -- Jtneill - Talk 05:24, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Note that Portal:Social entrepreneurship has a rather subterranean subpage structure which follows... -- Jtneill - Talk 14:24, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes - I'm aware. But I reckon it will have to be moved - its main namespace stuff. --McCormack 17:03, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * merge Portal:Advanced General Studies into School:Advanced General Studies: support, Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 16:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Just noting that on the talk page, Kim Tucker, who is mainly (solely?) responsible for Portal:FLOSS4Science and Portal:Social Entrepreneurship, has expressed his opposition to a move of these portals to the main namespace on the grounds that they contain primarily organisational material rather than "real content". I will therefore suggest to him that the Topic namespace might also be a good alternative for his purposes. --McCormack 17:10, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Agree re moving to Topic namespace; content appears to largely consist of links to external resources, with several subpages. -- Jtneill - Talk 14:04, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Mind you, if the links are mainly external, it ought really to be main namespace stuff. Organisational namespaces like Portal and Topic are for organising wikiversity material. --McCormack 15:35, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Not convinced: Ktucker 12:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC) [Note: reasons given just below.]
 * I thought the purpose of the "Portal" namespace was to identify/cluster areas of wikiversity which serve as "portals". The definition of "portal" has been contentious. But to me in this context, a portal is a site which
 * helps people find out what educational initiatives related to a topic are out there (including those on already on Wikiversity),
 * facilitates/catalyses collaboration among parties to co-create learning resources - preferably on Wikiversity - the challenge for the broader community is towards interoperability (see for example OER Interoperability meeting and OER Interoperability Sprint)
 * serves as a venue for showcasing learning resources, educators, student projects, etc.
 * The actual learning resources developed should be in the general default name space. Kim 10:24, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Re: 'Topic:' name space:
 * Social Entrepreneurship is an example of a growing number of multidisciplinary fields which do not fit naturally in traditional hierarchies (e.g. Social Science? Business Science? Humanities?). In the Social entrepreneurship portal we have a "Topics" box which is really just links to some of the top level categories we have created - a custom hierarchy for the Social Entrepreneurship portal. The pages found when browsing categories includes pages in various name spaces (as required :-). The categories do not correspond to the Wikiversity concept of "Topics" (traditional university hierarchies - "divisions", "departments", "centers", "programs").
 * FLOSS4Science is intended as a portal for any user of Wikiversity from any field of science to be able to find FLOSS to use, find people to share experiences and co-create learning resources for their field which use the software, and network with (or among) developers of FLOSS for science. So, the portal itself does not fit in the standard "topic" hierarchies, though the learning resources which appear on Wikiversity and linked to from this portal probably will (though they should be in the default main name space and structured in Wikiversity via Categories). Kim 10:24, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * So, I am still not convinced that these portals should be moved to the Topics name space. Kim 10:24, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Portal:Portals could be merged somehow with: Portal, Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 17:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Portal:Science. I do not understand the idea that "'Science' is far too wide ranging for this to be helpful." I believe that, "Portals can be created to serve the needs of specific topic areas, whether large or small". --JWSchmidt 01:29, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Major portals - another portal related page in the Wikiversity namespace. It seems to be useful, but I think it a little bit out of date. Shouldn't be also "reformed"? --Gbaor 12:47, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has a short list of links to major portals at the upper right corner of the main page. In addition to links to portals for different educational levels (primary, secondary, etc) I think Wikiversity should return to the practice of including a group of links from our main page to our most important major subject portals. --JWSchmidt 16:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * To the unsigned editor (above): the main page does include links to the main subject portals in a tree form; at the current time not all of these links are in the portal namespace (some are schools and some are categories or topics) because things need overhauling. Once the portal reform is implemented, the explorer tree can be updated to link more coherently to the major portals. Don't forget that the main page needs to have a certain aesthetic coherence - one should perhaps avoid throwing in a non-matching template. There is already an alternative template to the one you gave which coordinates aesthetically. --McCormack 15:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * This particular template "Main Page navigation" is just one that was available as an example. The key point is that many people who come to Wikiversity are familiar with navigating Wikipedia. Wikiversity can help itself by not abandoning the idea of providing new visitors with navigation aids that are familiar to them. --JWSchmidt 16:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * School:Law is really portal-type content and should be merged into the undeveloped Portal:Law page. -- Jtneill - Talk 11:43, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

merging and version history

 * What should we do when merging pages and both have talk pages with their version history ? Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 16:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Edit manually. ;-) --McCormack 17:03, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, both version histories can be kept with moving one talk page (e.g. talk page2) as subpage of the talk page1 (e.g. talk page1/Archive) and then make a link on talk page1 to it. But I was asking because there is a merge log available - I wonder if there is also a tool available which allows merge of pages ? I will digg later into this, Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 17:22, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Many of these pages don't have much of a history. On the other hand, you raise a good point in the context of some mergers. For example, to keep the history, Portal:Fine Arts should probably be moved to Portal:Arts before the integration is started. --McCormack 17:28, 13 May 2008 (UTC)


 * This is an important point for us in the work we are doing. We are supporting content development by incentivising and rewarding people (students and educators) who edit pages. If we lose the history of the page, this approach and the research around uptake and usage among learners and educators will become really difficult. Kim 10:28, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I like boilerplates
At some of the portals (e.g. Portal:History) I have seen that it is possible to create pages with boilerplates. I like this idea (e.g. because it helps newcomers easily to understand the syntax). About how to improve the boilerplate we can talk later.

Unfortunately this is used only at about 6 portals :-( Which is the best place to note this and more important to use this in the portal reforms ? I thought about here Portal talk:Portals, but well seems there is not so much action :-) Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 17:39, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * probably somewhere at Portal, Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 17:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes - I had been intending to expand the use of these boilerplate page creation facilities. It's all a matter of time availability! One suggestion: most of these portals already have a related project box, and the boilerplate could include a project box. --McCormack 04:32, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Odd portal names

 * On hitting random portal, I got some weird ones: Portal:Learning_Materialsnew and Portal:Researchnew. What are these? -- Jtneill - Talk 14:07, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Things I deliberately left out because they were once work in progress. They can be deleted - just be careful (well, perhaps not - just zap 'em)! --McCormack 15:29, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Or at least made into subpages, and perhaps changed to "/Concept" - which I think would make it uniform with the mainpage. But... --Remi 01:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)


 * The biggest problem with all these "concept" pages in the portal namespace is that they confuse the listings for anyone trying to analyse the namespace - there are perhaps 100 or so such pages. And currently they contain nothing other than copies of the portals they are supposed to belong to. It would be helpful in future if portal "concept" pages (or draft revisions) were created for the short time they were needed and then deleted afterwards. It's just basic housekeeping. --McCormack 04:01, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Perhaps encourage users to do this sort of thing in a "Sandbox" User:JBloggs/MySandBox Kim 10:31, 16 May 2008 (UTC)