Wikiversity talk:Community Review/Fringe research

First conversation
I added this comment later so this thread woudld have a name-Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 03:42, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

I think I just reinvented the wheel! In response to a posting at Requests_for_Deletion#Main_Page_"Lectures", I gave the problem of fringe science some thought and wrote this response (in my own user space because talk pages get so cluttered with nonsense). Among other things, I advocated for a strong Advisory Board for Wikivesity (see "we need a chain of command" in the essay) Then I saw Excluded research on this page, and eventually clicked my way to (betawiki) Review board

I would like to help. I have 16 refereed publications, with a recent online article in Sky&Telescope, and also a submission on Bell's Theorem that seems to have perplexed the American Journal of Physics for almost 120 days.

I must admit that I am not 100% sure this effort will succeed. You have a lot more wikimedia experience than I, but mine is almost entirely on Wikiversity, which I am beginning to understand to be more of a wikitext file-storing service than an organized wiki. While I can accept with the status quo, I am willing cooperate with those who wish to change it. Who knows, it might work!

-yours very truly, Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 20:46, 2 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Looks interesting... Probably I could help, too, within mathematics (which should not be a hard work, I guess).
 * But I disagree with Guy Vandegrift's position at one point: "I believe the success of Wikipedia was due in part to the policy of having only one article per subject." As I wrote more than once on talk pages of Wikiversity, this "no content forking" policy of Wikipedia nearly prevents it from being helpful to students, at least in hard science, and probably in other topics. Indeed, in real world we have a lot of textbooks on every topic. Surely you understand, why. A single textbook cannot satisfy all students. Whether an encyclopedic article can? A good question; maybe not; but for textbooks, lectures, explanatory essays and other learning resources the problem is much harder. Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 21:42, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Some quotes from Wikipedia talks:
 * "... we have to avoid injecting our own perspective and vision into articles we write here. But that perspective and vision is exactly what would be necessary to give a good course on a topic. We aren't trying to give a course here, though, just a reference." Carl 13:09, 20 October 2017


 * "I do think that there is a difference between presenting a reference on a topic and presenting a textbook or expository essay. This difference is somewhat captured by the quote "The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter." from WP:NOT." Carl 20:21, 24 October 2017


 * "Wiki seems to be a bad medium for writing textbooks or preparing learning materials ... the great courses and textbooks are about personal touches and visions." Taku 23:46, 29 October 2017
 * Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 22:05, 2 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I intended the "the success of Wikipedia" to be the fact that most of their articles meet a certain standard that we have failed to achieve on Wikiversity. Wikipedia has not succeeded in creating usable teaching materials.  My favorite example is Hooke's law, which begins by insulting all but the lowest level readers by stating the same equation in three different ways: $$F=kX$$, $$X=F/k$$ and finally $$F=-kX$$.  Midway through the article they are already at post-graduate level tensor analysis.  That is a range of almost 10 years of education.  The task at hand is how can we maintain quality control AND permit parallel efforts?--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 03:52, 3 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Let us recall, how "quality control AND parallel efforts" is implemented in the "real world" (of books, lectures etc) (but not on youtube :-). Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 05:49, 3 January 2018 (UTC)


 * That is a GREAT question--Гай vandegrift (Обсуждение • Вклад участника) 14:55, 3 January 2018 (UTC) .... First, we need decentralized diversity. No single "government" should rule Wikiversity.  Second, within each governing agency, we need the type of quick decision making you see in "real world" of books, lectures (and even governments).  This requires not one, but a several Review boards that can make decisions without the lengthy discussions that arise when Wikiversarians attempt to "clean up" this wiki.


 * I propose that all questionable works be placed as subspaces of something in name space, with a primary advisory board used to settle disputes. But within that space, the primary board leaves things alone.  For example, we should have two "Fringe Science" pages.  One contains the study of "fringe science" as a pathological phenomenon ("why are people superstitious?") as an example of this, see Lunar_effect by Mu301.  And, we need another main page resource, under which all theories that might be considered "Fringe Science", along with a neutral statement explaining that these articles are controversial.  I, for example, have a controversial idea about how to teach general relativity that has been rejected by several journals.  I will gladly "donate" submit that article to this "fringe" science section for that governing board's consideration.  The review process needs to be decentralized (this something Wikipedia failed to do):  Those who contribute the fringe science articles should, in general, exert editorial control over those articles.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 15:20, 3 January 2018 (UTC)


 * My feeling is that most of the disruption caused by cold fusion and parapsychology was due to an unfamiliarity with, and lax enforcement of. the requirements in our long standing original research guidelines: these resources did not honestly disclose that it was 1) original research, 2) with a biased POV, and 3) misleadingly presented the resources as a mainstream reassessment of the subject. (All of which are requirements of the current guidelines.)


 * you are a lot more open about admitting that you "have a controversial idea" than the contributors to those pages were. Alternatives to teaching general relativity would comply with our existing guidelines by simply stating so up front and would not require a review, imho. I'm not sure we need to spend time and effort at this time on a vetting process for un-problematic resources. FYI, I've been lurking and following some of your ideas on the subject. I find it very fascinating, but I may not have time to follow up on these ideas in the next couple of weeks. There are a few important issues that I am currently researching which may play an important deciding factor in which proposals to improve wv or review our resources that I choose to support. See User:Mu301/Learning_blog for some initial thoughts. I haven't quite wrapped my head around what exactly wikidata is working towards, but I've seen enough to realize that it has profound implications to our efforts here. I believe an understanding of those efforts should guide how we curate and organize our content. --mikeu talk 16:04, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * While you being busy for the next couple of weeks, I will be bold with Lunar effect. Don't worry, it's reversible, and intended more to start a conversation than anything else.  I  lack the wiki-skills to understand  wikidata.  And I am too busy to learn about it.  But I will listen to and probably take your advice when you finally get your head wrapped around wikidata.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 16:47, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * At this time the lunar effect page is just a start class stub. It makes little difference to me what title is used. However, I think you might have broken the cross-link between lunar effect and lunar effect which prevents automatic cross-wiki discovery of related resources. This could damage my attempts to attract collaboration to the project from contributors at wikipedia or other sister projects. I had to manually create a link to compensate for thet. That simple rename just added the resource to a mediawiki wide Orphaned pages. There are broader implications to such seemingly harmless actions that you should consider when performing these sorts of actions. They have consequences beyond en-wv. --mikeu talk 17:09, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Let me try to explain my partial understanding of some aspects of wikidata. Imagine a machine (ie. something like a WV:BOT) that mindlessly scans many wikis for a phrase like "lunar effect" and the equivalent translation in multiple languages. When it finds an exact match it creates a cross-wiki correspondence between two or more identically titled pages. Inserting special characters confuses these automatons and prevents them from accomplishing the task. I can't say I understand fully the ramifications of such a page rename. The redirect might save the page from orphaned status or it might not. That's part of what I'm trying to wrap my head around at the moment. We just don't know what the implications of such actions are. --mikeu talk 17:31, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * And to make matters worse, I jut moved Lunar effect back to its original location, which probably means you have to go back and fix some sort of wikimedia redirect. I picked that Lunar effect for the first entry because it looked underdeveloped -- something nobody would notice being moved (and I didn't want to move any of my work because that would look like self-promotion.  Little did I know that you were also tinkering with inter-wiki stuff.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 20:10, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Citizendium
Back to "the GREAT question" (how can we maintain quality control AND permit parallel efforts). An attempt of Citizendium failed badly. I was an editor there, I saw the failure, but I still do not understand its reason(s). It would be good for us to understand it, and avoid. (See w:Talk:Citizendium, my remark of 18:47, 15 September 2017.) Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 19:47, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Voting
A naive idea. We could organize "voting of students" and "voting of experts" for every resource, make the results visible to all readers, and establish some rules, how the namespace depends on these results. A resource that does not interest students does not deserve the mainspace; also a resource that causes objections from experts does not deserve the mainspace. "Experts like you can vote on posts, so the most helpful answers are easy to find." "Earn reputation and additional privileges for posts others find helpful." "Each of our 170 communities is built by people passionate about a focused topic." (Quoted from stackexchange.) Clever, and proven to be effective! Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 21:03, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * This is not a naive idea. It is an interesting variation on the already proposed Review board--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 21:16, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you. My experience on Citizendium tells me that probably students feel uncomfortable on a wiki when being supervised by experts, and possibly criticized, corrected etc.; this sounds negative. Probably, voting (even if ultimately equivalent to that negative intervention) sounds rather positive: ...I have a chance to get a high grade!.. Boris Tsirelson (discuss • contribs) 21:31, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't know that anyone has suggested that this process would include reviewing "every resource" on our site. Please note that this page was created to address specific problems with only two topics. We're merely using this review to supplement our other processes which failed to adequately contain the disruption that these two subjects brought to our site. --mikeu talk 21:56, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I see what mikeu is saying. This page is about Cold fusion and Parapsychology.  We are mixing our threads and talking about something  Dave Braunschweig brought up here. We should  continue this conversation either at "Requests for Deletion", or on a blog I just learned how to make at User:Guy vandegrift/Blog/Making Wikiversity less chaotic. Regarding the topic at hand, I feel that the Wikiversity Cold fusion needs to exist somewhere, but not in main space.  I vote to delete Cold fusion and tender an offer to undelete and return it to a location to be discussed and decided later.  --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 22:25, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, these are great ideas on this page. Perhaps we could rename it to Wikiversity: namespace to continue the discussion. I told User:Abd (the main contributor) that I would leave them in place for a little bit to give time to archive it and copy to another site. The task on this page is for us to discuss creation of new pages on the topics. --mikeu talk 22:30, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Ask the Cold fusion editors to police Cold fusion and make it their problem?Emojione 1F921.svg --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 23:42, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Seriously, I know more than enough about Cold fusion to do that page. Would it be OK with all concerned if I move the "essays" into subpages?  We will need to verify that subpages don't interfere with the wikidata connections.  If you think about it, this is a good way for Wikiversity to distinguish itself from Wikibooks.  They use subpages to organize large textbooks, we use them for student projects.  I will write a balanced and short essay on the distinction between scientific consensus and universally accepted fact.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 23:55, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Please don't. The problem is not the physics or content. It is the disruption to our project. Please, if you want to create a new page submit a formal proposal outlining how you will prevent the problems of the past. That is the whole point of this discussion page. Let's just take a long break from the subject for a while. mikeu talk 00:08, 4 January 2018 (UTC)