Wikiversity:What-goes-where 2024

- The premise of this page is that policy decisions on page deletions are coupled into other questions: When do we move pages into draft-space, user-space, or place them into subpages of namespace? It's all one big conundrum. - At the moment there I am the only contributor to this page. You may edit or add sections as you wish. We can work out the organizational details later --Guy vandegrift -

The question of permanent residence for Draft:Foobar
We need to resolve the question of whether resources can remain indefinitely in draft-space. Recent discussions have been held in three places:
 * Wikiversity:Colloquium
 * Wikiversity talk:Drafts
 * Wikiversity talk:Deletions

From these three pages, I count the following "votes" on the motion to revert the 6-month rule and allow articles in draft-space to remain indefinitely:
 * 4 vote in Favor of permanent residence for articles in draft-space: User:Guy vandegrift, User:Michael Ten, User:Jtneill, User:Addemf
 * 1 is Skeptical: User:Dan Polansky
 * 1 Opposes the motion: User:koavf

Is a 4-1-1 vote a consensus? Was this even a vote, since I inferred these "votes" from remarks the editors made. If and when we get a proper vote, should a bureaucrat close it? For what it's worth, the vote is 2-0-1 in favor if you count members of the Support staff. Also, the person doing this counting is very bad at arithmetic, so I can't even guarantee that the vote tally is correct.
 * "Is a 4-1-1 vote a consensus?" IMO until there is more participation, yes. i am biased though. if others join the project who care enough to voice an opinion later... the guideline/policy can always be changed back so that good faith Creative Commons contributions start being regularly deleted then, yes? limitless peace. Michael Ten (discuss • contribs) 19:24, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Drafts deleted too soon might never get the chance to flourish by being taken over by a new editor. It would be more productive if they could immediately resume on existing work rather than starting over or asking for the restoration of a draft. As far as I know, Wikipedia drafts are deleted after half a year because their draft space is only sparsely monitored, but Wikiversity is not close to the size of Wikipedia, so that is not an issue for us.

I think inactive drafts should simply be deposited into the author's user space so they can keep working on it should they come back, or another editor finds it through the light red notice saying the page has been moved.

If someone is concerned about drafts being confused with main space resources, perhaps a box at the top, such as template:draft, would prevent drafts for being mistaken as main space resources, but I think it is very unlikely to happen anyway. Someone who is able to find a page in user space will surely be able to distinguish user space from main space. Elominius (discuss • contribs) 22:04, 14 April 2024 (UTC) - 22:15, 14 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I agree that inactive drafts belong in the author's userspace. The problem is with articles that do not belong in mainspace that were written by multiple authors.  This is the problem that Draft:Archive is designed to solve.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 23:44, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
 * In case of multiple authors, a possibility would be the page creator's user space, or the user space of the editor who contributed the most text.
 * If a page was moved away without leaving a redirect, a red box shows where it was moved so it can be found by anyone who might want to work on it. Users can also opt to adopt drafts by moving them from an inactive author's user space into their own. Elominius (discuss • contribs) 00:42, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Terminology and Flowchart

 * top-namespace: Google searches top-mainspace articles like Foobar. Such pages can also be found by clicking "Random" on Wikiversity.
 * sub-namespace: Foo Studies/Foobar is also searched by Google, which can bypass the parent page and reach subpages, causing the child to get more visits than the parent |Physics_equations/Current_and_current_density (example.)
 * user-space User:John Doe/Foobar is a destination for a move of Foobar out of mainspace whenever User:John Doe is the sole author.  I don't think user-space is searched by Google (can anybody verify?)
 * draft-space was initially intended to be a construction site for Foobar, but recently we have been moving Foobar to Draft:Foobar in order to get the page out of namespace if it has multiple authors (e.g., User:Jane Doe in the flowchart shown.)
 * draft-archive Draft:Archive/2024/Foobar is an add-hoc space created by requests to get Foobar out of draft-space. One advantage of draft-archive is that all such pages are adjacent to each other. This makes it easy to purge archived pages of entities such as category membership. A purged and archived page can be seen at  Draft:Archive/2024/Adobe Illustrator.
 * Hard and soft deletions: Pages that violate obvious rules (e.g., copyright) are easily identified and can be deleted immediately in what might be called a hard deletion. Soft deletion is identical to the hard, except that the user understands that the page can be undeleted upon request.  One way to achieve this is to maintain a list of pages that have been soft deleted. We also need to tell users where they can find this list (see this collection of files have been "soft" deleted from a userspace at User:Guy vandegrift/Soft deletions

Too many choices?
It is possible that this flowchart diagram gives us too many choices that it will difficult for our community to reach a consensus and take action. For that reason, we should consider narrowing our option from those presented the flowchart.

Having said that we might have too many choices, there is another option that we can include without cluttering up the rules: Apparently it is possible to store a document on Google in a way that permits discovery via a Google search:
 * Socialism Google search with keywords site:docs.google.com
 * Socialism essay stored by Google

I do not know if this service is provided for free; I vaguely recall setting my Google docs to private when I created my own (free) account. But if this is possible, we certainly should advise users of this option when we tell them they can't have something in mainspace.

Personal subpages (with visual editing)
The "Wikiversity:" namespace does not provide visual editing. Here you can create a personal subspace with visual editing. It can also be used as a personal edit space that you can link to from this discussion. It is completely editable, and there is no reason to sign everything you like. And it has a talk page so others can comment on your ideas.

It is not necessary to name the personal userpage with your username (i.e., User:Foobar uses Foobar.) Also, Guest is just that: You are free to play with it, or if you don't have a personal subpage, you can use Guest to draft complicated text before entering into even draft a witty reply before entering it into What-goes-where 2024


 * List of personal subpages