Wikiversity talk:Curriculum committee/List of Schools

Thanks to Sidelight for starting this page. What he has placed here isn't exactly what I had in mind. That would have been this. What I think Sidelight has done is list what he thinks would be legitimate Schools. Looking at the full list, I can see many others that I could easily see being, real world, actual brick and mortar schools. There actually are, for example, Schools of Automobile Maintenance, and Schools of Agriculture, and many others where we have some School page. But there would be no School:Doing science, and there are also many other similar examples.

To confuse everything, there are also Portals. School:Doing science is more what I think a Portal might be. Great idea, by the way, that's a nice page. But it's not a school. It's an activity. Perfect for a Portal, I'd think. Perhaps I'm confused, but, if so, so are a lot of us! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:07, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * That sort of was my idea of schools, except for cleaning it up and moving some of these to subpages of schools. Something like what a legitimate school would be named, but more structural than this. What a task! - Sidelight12 Talk 05:21, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikis normally proceed and create guidelines based on what is actually being done. While we should certainly respect what has been done, we are finding that what has actually been done is an inconsistent mess, at least in part. It's been known for years, and the community has mostly shied away from fixing it, too much work. However it isn't too much work, in fact, once we have clear guidelines based on the actual needs of the community, which we will derive from what's been done. Some of the work can be very quickly done, if we just know what to do. If we each try to fix it our own way, the normal wiki adhocracy, we will simply create new messes to be cleaned up by the next generation.
 * We have needed this project for a long time! I've mostly been in denial about it, sort of hoping the problem would just go away, doing my own work in mainspace and moving only to clean up mainspace a little, generally through subpage organization. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:34, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

And more and more confusion
So, I was so foolish as to look at the Portal namespace and found Portal:Box-footer. WTF is that? It is a module to be transcluded. I.e, it belongs in Module space, my guess, which seems to have been designed for such. I didn't even know we had a Module space until just now. Someone else didn't either, someone who was a busy little bee, apparently. Or, again, do I have this all crazy?

Namespaces doesn't list the Module namespace. Portal:Box-footer could be, if I'm correct, a template, as templates can be transcluded. Definitely this snippet of wikitext doesn't belong in the Portal namespace.

Looking at the Box-footer history, that page was created by JWSchmidt, one of the Wikiversity founders, and also a major editor of the namespace page. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I suppose. However, it also could simply be that he is a biology professor, not a curriculum administrator.... and nobody's perfect.

Fixing this little mess is going to take David's bot. We are going to accumulate quite a To-Do list! What do you think, Template or Module? Does anyone know the intention of the Module space? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:28, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * don't worry about module. Module is like the functionality of the programming used for templates, links, presentation, markup. It is not Wikiversity learning content. Do you think everyone should meet at irc, #Wikiversity-en? We don't have enough participation. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:34, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Is that box-footer page appropriate for a module or template? It's in a space intended for learning content.
 * I'm not going to meet on IRC, but you can certainly suggest participation here, there. I may invite participation on Wikiversity-l. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:36, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Templates and wikimarkup use modules to function. I think someone didn't know what they were doing, and used the wrong namespace (created a nonfunctional page). I've seen that before, even in a request, I didn't know how to respond to. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:39, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * That "nonfunctional page" is in wide use, it's transcluded. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:58, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure about portal, it seems useless on Wikipedia, but it beats what we all thought 'topic' was. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:40, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I think I see a possible functional difference between Portal and Topic. Later. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:58, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Portal:Box-footer was used in the design of the portal templates (template in the generic sense). Properly, it belongs in the Template: namespace, as it is Wiki markup with replaceable parameters used in multiple locations. The Module: namespace is for Lua code, a much better way to write templates that is now available. Please use Bots/Requests to identify bot needs. I will get to them as time allows. Unfortunately, I will be much less active for the next seven months than I have been. I need to finish up 12 hours of graduate credit, and I got drafted on to two committees at my college that each require several hours of what was formerly 'free time' each week. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:33, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

And out of the muck, the lotus
Brilliant work, Sidelight. In many ways. I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Let's continue to explore the concept of School. Universities are often collections of Schools. You have mentioned School as a community, and that seems crucial. While a single individual may organize and run a school, in real life, offering all the courses of the school, and we have seen this happen here, it's not stable and it can be quite unreliable.

You suggested, among other things, locking School pages so they can't be moved. That is going to run into some opposition, but it might be part of what we do. That definitely requires consensus, because of the traditions of wikis. I suggest we set this issue aside for now, it's really an issue of how we stabilize what we build, and should build the structure first. We can then look at how to protect it from disruption.

I do see page protection as being part of the solution on Wikiversity. We have a huge collection of resources that have been abandoned by their creators. Protecting abandoned resources has an obvious problem: how can they be improved, then? That question does have an answer. Protecting the resource disallows random vandalism and other hijacking of the resource. Wikipedia probably has as many Recent Changes Patrollers as it does vandals. RCP still doesn't catch everything. The Wikipedia structure, however, is radically inefficient. We can't afford that inefficiency, it burns out editors and administrators, as well as being relatively unreliable.

It would be fairly simple for a user here who wants to work on a protected resource to request unprotection, and even without unprotection, it is trivial to create an alternate page, and the structure we set up will show how to do that. Then, when the alternate page is considered improved, it can be substituted for the protected one. All it would take is some consent from others. Part of what we set up would be efficient structure for that. We aren't Wikipedia, limited to one page on a resource.

There I go, getting ahead of where we are to opine on possibilities. Sorry. Suffice it to say that there are possibilities, even to do what has never been done before.

I intend to look at schools, through on-line catalogs. What is the organization of other schools? The Brittanica, though an interesting source, isn't a school. It is an encyclopedia! It organizes knowledge in a somewhat different manner.

I noticed a few things about your list. Under Philosophy you have Language Interpretation. I think we would call that Semantics, the normal name for the formal study of the philosophical study of language in operation. "Religious belief" isn't the proper name, it would be Religion.

What I'm truly grateful for, though, is the list, not necessarily all of its details. It's showing what might be possible.

A School offers curricula, typically. Those curricula are commonly organized toward educational goals, often occupationally defined. A School of Religion may offer a degree, and to earn the degree, one must satisfactorily complete all the courses in the curriculum. That might, for a Doctor of Divinity degree, say, might include courses in history, philosophy, psychology, communication, etc. The goal is to educate those who might then become ministers, employed by churches or the like.

We aren't a degree-granting institution, but it is not impossible that a degree-granting institution, separately organized, could use structures here, adding to that its own structures that would handle certification issues. It would be, presumably, a collaborative nonprofit. It would support us, as it could. It could have paid staff. It could manage a related school or school here. We wouldn't be responsible for it. There are ethical issues that would have to be addressed, but the problems are soluble. The relationship would be mutually beneficial. We don't have the same problems with conflict of interest that Wikipedia does.

To give a small example, our only significantly active bureaucrat is a professional, literally a professor. He's paid. He runs a course here. Does he have a possible conflict of interest? Of course he does. But that does not prevent mutual benefit. One example showed up where a problem arose out of the conflict, a student who wanted his work deleted. It was resolved, though not necessarily in the best way. The most important part of conflict of interest policy on Wikipedia is disclosure. The rest of it is often a knee-jerk assumption that those with a conflict of interest will be greedy and offensively biased, and where that comes from I'm not going to say. Wikipedians might not like it.

We do act, and swiftly and with high consensus, to prevent spamming, which we know when we see it. I have sometimes offered to apparent spammers the opportunity to actually create related resources here, suggesting that if they did that, linking to their own web site on their user page -- and maybe elsewere -- might then be allowed. None of them have ever taken me up on it, which says something. They are actually spammers, and spam requires high efficiency. Too much trouble to actually engage with a community, the economics of email spam depends on keeping the cost of each user contact very, very low.

Again, does anyone know of prior efforts to organize the School structure along these lines? If we do our work with the School namespace well, I think the use of the other namespaces will fall into place, fairly easily. So let's focus, to start, on the School structure. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:37, 27 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I only want the top two levels locked in, then consensus can make the request. The only purpose of page protection is to prevent clutter from someone who doesn't know what's going on. The sub layers anyone can do without asking. The first level should be complete. The second level down isn't complete, its just a starting point for people to get the idea. Keep in mind, second level categories can fall under more than one top category. We need either 3rd level categories that aren't locked in, or we could use them as course:s instead. Courses in its own namespace would allow more flexibility as a course can be part of many schools, transclusion is the other option. But courses in its own name space also causes problems as the need for the bulky namespace. Is it bulky going three levels for example: school:Science/biology/kinesics


 * What word would be for both Math and Logic together? Is there a better word for computer science, programming possibly? - Sidelight12 Talk 13:54, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Every daughter school, or daughter school that falls under to parent schools, can be under its own page. Then the underlying school can be transcluded to the subpage of both top level schools. The daughter school could be edited from either transcluded page. - Sidelight12 Talk 13:59, 27 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Transclusion vs merely linking is a choice that can be made later. With transclusion, School pages could become enormous. The concept of courses being subpages of schools is very likely unworkable. Courses stand alone, in fact. A school may offer a course, and someone can audit just the course. It's a room somewhere, in real life, and people can walk in, usually, if it's a free course. Sometimes registration is required. The room can be "off-campus," the course is associated with the school, most clearly, because it is listed in the school catalog.


 * A down side of transclusion is that it can confuse the hell out of editors. You go to edit something you see, and -- Whoa! It's not there!


 * Our traditional organization here is this: individual courses are in mainspace, usually. Schools establish catalogs of courses, fulfilling the educational mission of the school. What Sidelight is calling "courses" is actually a curriculum, a "course of study," that includes many classes. Those may be "Portals," perhaps. So a School may link to Portals that organize school offerings into some particular sequence, for some particular purpose.


 * Schools don't "own" the courses. If anyone owns them, it is the "instructors" or "students" who put them together and maintain them.


 * Another name for what Sidelight is calling a "course" is a Topic. The distinction between Topic and Portal we can work out later, I have some ideas. We are starting here to consider School structure, which I see as fundamental.


 * The fundamental unit of education on Wikiversity is the "resource," and resources are generally found in mainspace. We have been working, and enjoying substantial consensus on, using subpages in mainspace to handle resources that are too specific to be considered as a class, something that would be found in a university catalog, as distinct from a single lecture, a handout, a seminar session as a class activity, or an essay or piece of homework.


 * When we are done, mainspace will be a collection of classes, effectively, at the top level. We might have some catchall class, we have started an Essay resource, as I recall. Hey, practice writing essays!! How about an essay contest! Featured Essay on the main page? Ah, so many ideas, so little time.


 * Schools will then present a structure of classes, linking to them. Schools will organize participants, with substructures being found, perhaps, on Topic pages linked from schools. Interested in quantum mechanics? Willing to help with all related classes? Take a look at the topic page, which will be linked from all relevant schools and which will list all relevant schools and all related resources.


 * A very important part of Wikiversity structure is the collection of links. An unlinked resource is fairly unlikely to be useful to many. Users create them all the time, focusing solely on what matters to them. Hey, Wikiversity is cool! I can write about whatever I like! Yes, Randy, you can. Welcome to Wikiversity! I'm moving your essay to your user space until we can figure out where to categorize it. "Fairies in the big city" is a fascinating topic, you are willing to think outside the box. Now, the rest of us live in boxes, as a saying attributed to Carl Sagan went, lest our brains fall out. Any ideas? Don't worry. We will *not* delete your essay, as long as it isn't illegal, immoral, fattening or a violation of copyright or libel laws.


 * (And then we need to clarify and formally express the policy I just implied. What are the real rules here? Wikipedia has a collection of really excellent fake rules. That is, the rules -- called "policies and guidelines" -- have no reliable enforcement process, so you can follow the rules, precisely, and get whacked, or perhaps waste a lot of time.

Wikipedia policies and guidelines are written by consensus, but it's an ad hoc consensus, typically, not actually shown to be overall acceptable. In theory, policies are supposed to follow actual practice, but "actual practice," I found, can deviate widely from what those who have the policy and guideline pages watchlisted will allow. When I saw a whole series of AfDs on a particular subject area (amateur radio clubs recognized by the major international organization, one per nation) go one way, when the policy went the other, and attempted to edit the policy page to match actual practice -- and actual practice, to me, made more sense than the policy, which is why it was routinely finding consensus on AfDs -- it was strongly resisted. "Instruction creep," "Violates X," etc.) So the result was that good faith deletionists would propose pages for AfD, and the AfD would usually fail. Colossal waste of time. And those who love to write policy don't care about waste of time! They care about what is "right.") One of a long series of AfDs succeeded, just the breaks of who showed up. Deleting the article on one of the oldest amateur radio clubs on the planet, where most sources would have been old newspapers in Chinese, difficult for Wikipedians to find. I went for DR on that. As I recall, the deletion was reversed. All a huge waste of time, it would have been far easier for the policy to be made to follow actual practice.)

--Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:42, 27 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Curriculum is a better name, so if people don't mind typing it in all the time. Topic is a bad name for this, and it doesn't mean what we're looking for. On Wikipedia, they use Taskforces as subpages to Wikiprojects. How taskforces worked [to be under two parent wikiprojects] was structurally flawed, because one Wikiproject would get the page, and the other would be a redirect. This worked, (and it would be under the project it had more in common with) but it lacks symmetry. School, Wikiproject and taskforces are all about wikicommunity, not the resources themselves. - Sidelight12 Talk 14:52, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Creation of subpage for draft
I've created a subpage for Sidelight12's draft. That is in no way a deprecation of Sidelight's work, the opposite, in fact. Sidelight properly has editorial control over his draft. He may accept the edits of others to it, or not. Any user may create a new draft, linking it from the List page. For a school name to be listed on the List page, we should have consensus.

Early drafts, if made to a proposal page, can radically warp final results, it's a common wiki problem. People pop in, and without seeing the range of alternatives, because they haven't been brought up yet, say "Yeah, great! I'm on board!" And then never comment again, since they are done. And so we can sometimes get locked into what is inferior to what is possible. We are dealing with issues that have been hanging around for years. There is no rush. Let's do this right, lets nail it.

We will grow a consensus list here, on this page, but at any time, we may propose to substitute an alternate draft, in toto, or in part. We are only building a preliminary, committee consensus here, the community, when we approach it with work we deem ready, will probably have some choices. We will also create process that will maintain school structure, ongoing, so that we don't remain prisoners of the past. Education is a living thing. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:08, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Regarding Schools
Commenting here just because I'm not sure where above would have been the best place. While I appreciate the efforts to organize schools, I am concerned about using an encyclopedia as a reference point, and also any comparisons to Wikipedia in the design. Those come across, at least initially, as a better way to organize Wikipedia than they do as a better way to organize Wikiversity.

Can we start smaller in scope? Before making lists, can we define what we believe different namespaces should represent? What is a School:? What is a Topic:? What is a Portal:?

By the way, when I say these aren't searchable, what I mean is that content from those namespaces does not appear if you just type a search term in the Search box. It only appears if you do an advanced search and indicate that you want to include content from those namespaces. I don't have any statistics on how many users do advanced searches, but my guess is that the common user coming here for a quick search does not do any advanced searching of non-default namespaces.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:46, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Here is fine, Dave. I also pointed out the problem of using an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias classify knowledge. That's related to schools, but not quite the same. I still think that this gave Sidelight a leg up. You are asking the same questions I've been asking, and it is our job here to either find answers or to create them. That is, there are some existing answers to the "what is ..." questions, but they are not necessarily consistent, not necessarily how the project has actually been built, etc. We are not limited to what has already been done. But we should respect it. That is, attempt to understand it before changing it!


 * There are also the ordinary meanings of words. Newcomers will, by default, consider that we are using words with ordinary meanings, and we should, where possible, to not contradict ordinary meanings, and, where possible, to use them. School and topic are ordinary words, that may have meanings that are possible uses here, not totally inconsistent with what has been done. (And we can bet that many users created school and topic resources with the ordinary meanings in mind, regardless of what was said here and there.)


 * Portal is an ordinary word, all right, indicating an entry point. I read it, just from the word and some of the usage, as an entry point for an educational process. I was a very active Wikipedia user, I had over 14,000 edits on Wikipedia (and most of these were complex edits), and I never read a portal, I had little concept of what they were. They are covered in w:Wikipedia:Portal. I assume that the usage here came from that.


 * Oddly, here, and so far, the best example of a portal, to me, is not in the Portal namespace yet. It is School:Doing science. [And below I see that I was wrong. What was I thinking? I misread the page, projecting on to it what I thought it might be.] As someone with some substantial scientific training, way back there, with an active interest in science to the point of creating employment in the field, I see no distinction between "doing science" and "science." What is often called "science," is a work product of science, not science itself. So students may learn or memorize lots of "facts" called "scientific facts," without knowing anything about the methods of science. Science is a method, not content. No school would be named "Doing science." It would be named School:Science or something else, such as School:Natural science. School:Doing science is an approach to science. When I first saw it I thought of it as aimed at young students. In fact, that school was started by JWSchmidt, in 2006. It is a very general portal, and it hardly mentions the core of what the name would refer to: learning to use the scientific method. Instead, it seems to consider science more as something established, though there are hints otherwise. It doesn't point to any coverage of the scientific method, which is what would be crucial. Yuk.


 * I've often found, in various fields, that an early misunderstanding was pointing to something that might even be widely overlooked. When I first heard about "Single transferable vote," I assumed something about it that wasn't correct. But it turns out that what I assumed was the proposal of the greatest expert on voting systems of the 19th century: that candidates could transfer the votes they received to others. No, that's never been implemented in a public election. STV was Charles Dodgson's object of study, and he figured out how to make it work with relatively ignorant voters, who only knew their favorite. But actual STV systems only work within a party system, where candidates are recognized and associated through party affiliation....


 * Here, I see a portal as catering to the needs of a particular group of scholars. It's an entry point for them. It suggests looking at this or that, and it may suggest a sequence. It's a guide as well as an entry point. It might, in theory, also point to external sources, especially where Wikiversity has no adequate resources yet. (It might also continue to point to them, we should never try to own our readers.)


 * A topic as a different categorization of resources, and I see "topic" could be, if it isn't, a guide to resources that links them by topic. It's like categories, except that it can be much more intelligent than categories. As I mention elsewhere, a topic page could actually rate or recommend resources as developed -- or needing development. It can rate external links as useful or otherwise. (As these are opinions, they would be attributed. Fact need not be attributed.)


 * But the basic organizing space, here, is School.


 * The approach of beginning with lists of Schools is an approach to knowledge that is "understanding by example." This is not "fundamental understanding," i.e., starting with a theory of schools and then applying it. Rather, it uses our already-existing language and expectations to come up with examples, and then we examine the examples to find common characteristics.


 * I've been proposing looking at what real schools exist, and by "school" I mean what Sidelight has pointed to, collective activities, not merely those of individuals or perhaps very small groups. If we know that a school is housed in a building or set of buildings, what do we expect to find. If we have a School:Mathematics, what would we expect to find there? Would a real-world School of Mathematics mail us a catalog? What would be in it?


 * If we look at this, we will begin to find top-down organizing principles that might be applied here. We will become able to identify, among other things, what is missing. We would create schools with lots of red links!!! And then we would create working groups to turn those blue, and not just with stubs. In fact, red links may be better than stubs, precisely because they show what remains to be done.


 * As to searches, I think that the default searches are configurable, but most substantive content here is going to be found in resource pages, i.e., in mainspace. Schools, Portals, Topics are indexes to content. One will find them specifically from resource pages, perhaps through the category system, links contained on the pages, whatever. And if one wants to search, then, of course, one can use Advanced Search.


 * People will be able to find schools quickly from a top-down structure of schools, probably presented in Wikiversity space. Sidelight's school list hints at this. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:56, 27 January 2014 (UTC)


 * This was based off of branches of knowledge by Mortimer J. Adler. This is in no way the encyclopedia trying to dictate how things should be categorized, this is from the propaedia. There was an alternate categorization in this encyclopedia, but it was too complex. It doesn't matter if its based from an encyclopedia, but it matters that this is a clean and logical way to organize it. I added psuedoscience (we can discuss removing philosophy) to it, since there were subjects that I didn't know where they fit, possibly they would fit under a combination of Science and Philosophy. The best way to classify schools is by using the classification of knowledge. A brick and mortar university includes categorization for careers or its specialty, much of what is classification of knowledge, but it may omit other subjects that we wish to include here. This is like a university, but it is not a degree giving institution. - Sidelight12 Talk 04:21, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

I think I need to go to a more basic level of discussion first. Sidelight12 has suggested one set of containers. Abd has suggested another. In the discussion of the School: namespace, what is the benefit to having a School:? What purpose does it serve? What are the drawbacks? How many different schools provide value? How many is too many?

Can we look at the basic concept first, before deciding what goes in each bucket? What problem are we trying to solve, and how does the proposed modification solve it? I need to understand the purpose before I can assess which approach provides a better solution. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:56, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * A School: here was to be the equivalent to w:Wikipedia:WikiProject with participants to improve resources by category. It is a discussion forum. One major difference is that Wikiversity's schools have participants that can be teachers and students, with no distinction between the two. Wikipedia has it set up like this w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. - Sidelight12 Talk 16:10, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I hate to be difficult here, but can we put the discussion in a context other than Wikipedia? Their organization of resources didn't work here, and I'm not convinced that a similar organization of learning projects would be advantageous.  Instead, I think we should consider our organization just from a Wikiversity point of view.


 * Improving resources by category suggests that schools should exist for each category, or that categories should be organized by school. But I believe those serve different purposes, because most schools do not list their resources by category.  So there must either be more to it than that or something else behind the purpose of schools.


 * This perspective also makes the assumption that users would primarily come to a school looking to improve the content. I don't believe that is true.  I expect that a greater number come to a school looking to learn rather than looking to edit or teach.  I make this assumption based on the far greater number of readers we have than editors.  For example, School:Computer Science has had 3,410 readers in the last 30 days, but hasn't seen an edit in almost a year.


 * So, I'm back to my original questions. What is the benefit of having a School:?  What purpose does it serve?  What are the drawbacks?  How many different schools provide value, and how many is too many?  What problem are we trying to solve, and how does the proposed modification solve it?  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:59, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Its easy to see. I wanted to create a Wikiproject here, but then noticed that those where already here by the name Schools:. Again, the purpose is to be a discussion forum for subjects for participants (readers, contributors, teacher and student), also to improve resources (we can't have anyone to learn if there is no one to write resources). I wanted a base of around 5 schools. The second layer of schools is optional based on if there are participants, and it can be a combination of two top-level schools. school:Computer science should be a place to get general attention for that area instead of using your talkspace or colloquium as an invitation for anyone to respond. Most questions were already answered. It doesn't matter if this is not Wikipedia. I wish for readership to go up, so people can put a school in their watchlist to keep up with discussion on a specific field. - Sidelight12 Talk 17:13, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Have 5 top-level schools. Then its a forum and learning center. Someone can post there, "Hey I want help developing this," or "help me research this" instead of at the colloquium. Even with 10 contributors most of us can be a participant of most of the 5 base schools. - Sidelight12 Talk 17:21, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Okay, I think I now understand your purpose for having a School:. What about the 3,410 people who came to School:Computer Science this month and didn't discuss it?  What was their purpose for visiting the school?  What needs does it meet, and how will the proposed modification meet those needs?  There's more going on here than the uses identified so far.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:44, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I need to rethink this. Could School: serve two purposes, readership to direct to resources and participants? This is also a learning space that can be used without editing (as you said). We use its discussion page for content development. Some of the problem here is that namespaces were misnamed, not organized nor defined from the start. A school would be a place of interaction or (by wikiversity's definition) a place to learn by not developing resources? - Sidelight12 Talk 17:54, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * That's it. Schools serve different needs for different users.  We need to identify those needs before we redesign.  I will try to find time to generate statistics on which schools are popular by readership.  That may help us identify patterns of usage, and priorities for remodeling.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:18, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Let's leave schools alone. Possibly, drop the definition as a Wikiproject. Schools are learning hubs. Is there more definition that anyone would like to add to what a school is? WikiProject is the page that defined a School: and Topic: as Wikiprojects since 2007. Why can't you find this stuff? and why do I have to keep repeating myself? - Sidelight12 Talk 09:04, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I haven't had any difficulty in finding the original definitions. But when there is a proposal to change a functional interpretation of those definitions, I start by questioning the definition rather than the implementation.  I guess you have to keep repeating yourself until the actions you recommend are consistent with both your own vision and my understanding of how others use Wikiversity.  If I hadn't kept asking, you'd still be working on eliminating a number of primary 'learning hubs' and I still wouldn't understand why.  As to the approach, it's based on the Socratic method of asking questions until we both reach the same understanding.


 * That said, I'm not opposed to some consolidation in schools. Which still brings me back to my original questions of how many different schools provide value, and how many is too many?  Based on Curriculum committee/List of Schools/School Readers, I'd be willing to consolidate anything that draws less than 100 readers in 90 days.  For example, School:Broadcasting, School:Media studies and School:Media Technology could be combined into a single school that would bring combined readership up to the average.  There are others in the list that could be merged together with appropriate edits and redirects.  But I think incremental improvements would be easier for the community to accept than a wholesale change in approach. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:09, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * A school is a learning hub then, and not a wikiproject. You should have addressed the definition written by the earlier community, because it looks like you're ignoring this. I know what school implies, and its what you constantly keep telling me, but its not what the people who wrote the definition saw it as. Now we see their definition wasn't largely used, partly because school does not reflect their definition. No sense in using a definition that isn't the word's meaning, and then changing something with high readership. We should change the policy to say, a school: is not a wikiproject for content development, but rather it is a learning hub.


 * A merge template can go between those three schools, and allow consensus. Consolidating schools is no problem. How many schools is too much? you may have partially answered that question, depending if a schools has low readership and it fits compatibly with another school.


 * How do you want to deal with the topic: namespace? - Sidelight12 Talk 15:20, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * But a school is a WikiProject. It says so at both School and at WikiProject.  It just doesn't have the same meaning as a Wikipedia WikiProject.  That's okay, because this isn't Wikipedia.


 * Note that I didn't wish to address other definitions. I was seeking to identify your goals and understand the purpose for your recommendations.  Those weren't available elsewhere.  I'm sorry that you seem to find academic discourse uncomfortable.  Asking questions is how I find out if we have mutual understanding.  It's how I learn.


 * It sounds like we may have some consensus on how to draw a line between productive use of the school: namespace and less productive use of that space.


 * I don't have any great ideas for the Topic: namespace yet, other than that it doesn't seem to ever convey it's proper meaning to those who use it. It has many purposes, with no consistency.  I do think I would like to get away from the ideas of divisions and departments.  Or just combine them into departments.  Schools and departments, or schools and subjects, or maybe schools and topics (well-defined without the other expressed usages).


 * I think we need to decide how we are going to approach this. Are we going to work on School: first, or do we need a full namespace vision before we can address content?  I noticed you've already moved on to changing WikiProjects into Wikiprojects.  Can we discuss and come to consensus before making additional changes?  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:42, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * The only reason School says its a wikiproject is because I adjusted it (and another page) to resemble Wikiproject to clarify what a school is, see its history. I don't find academic discourse uncomfortable, the thing is, I told you in the first place that a school was defined as a wikiproject but you kept ignoring it. Feedback is important. Now you're saying they are the same, when by function they're different. Wikiversity lacks a project to collaborate as a forum for subjects. Something with a lot of views and few edits is not a collaboration forum for developing resources. School was meant to be a wikiproject, but it is not by its name and that had an influence on its function. Schools need to stay, but their association with wikiproject needs to be separated. Schools are a place mostly for readers and not contributors. Schools are also successful as a hub. What is needed is a space for collaborations (research is a good use for it). Wiki definitions need to match closely to real definitions, to prevent misuse. - Sidelight12 Talk 04:49, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Schools and topics both serve both purposes. Schools are primarily now viewing, but they can be used for collaboration.  I first started here by collaborating in a school talk page.  Topic is specifically for the collaboration you are looking for.  It may not be named correctly, but that is it's purpose.  The only one that seems to be really hung up on the term WikiProject is you, based on your experience with Wikipedia.  Again I encourage you to put your Wikipedia experience aside and focus on Wikiversity.  Clean up the WikiProject page as needed so that it is clear to Wikipedia users what Wikiversity does instead, but then focus your efforts on Topic, because that's what WikiProjects here currently are.  How can we improve the Topic namespace to meet both your needs and everyone else's?  'Research' in my world means something completely different than collaboration, and would intuitively exclude people from participating.  I'll start a new page and thread.  See Wikiversity talk:Curriculum committee/Topics  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * You're the one who was hung up. I'm the one who did see school as a wikiproject, until I noticed it is incompatible with the collaboration board we needed. I kept having to explain this. It was a viewing hub then, it is a viewing hub now, it is not the place for someone to draw attention for collaborative research development. School's function is to be left alone, as it is successful, is what it means, is necessary, and we need to clearly define it as to not contradict what it is. I was trying to see school and topic for a collaboration board, until noticing that school didn't fit this. The definitions need to be cleared up. Now everyone understands this better. - Sidelight12 Talk 17:41, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm stopping this thread. We're not getting anywhere.  Please note that whether or not I ask questions is not an indicator of my level of understanding of the topic. It is an indicator of my level of understanding your explanations.  In that regard, my approach failed.  I get schools.  I get topics as far as they go.  I get WikiProjects on Wikipedia.  I don't understand your explanations yet and I don't agree with your conclusions.  Schools are both.  Topics are both.  You can ignore them if you like, but don't change the definitions without consensus.  We don't have it yet.  Sorry.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:28, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Ugh. I just noticed that Sidelight renamed WV:WikiProject to WV:Wikiproject, and made a pile of changes to the page. I've reverted, and I'll ask Sidelight to move the page back. There are very good reasons for retaining the camel case name, it is precisely to interface with Wikipedia history and the expectations of Wikipedians. I have reverted the changes, not because they are wrong, necessarily, but because we are precisely engaged in the process of finding consensus about these things, and I'm glad to find that page -- I had not noticed it before -- as an historical view of what has been considered here. It confirms a lot. As we complete this discussion, we can review those changes.


 * We do not necessarily need a full namespace vision. It appears that School was intended to be the basic, overall, organizational device or "project device." However, the founders of Wikiversity still thought in terms of creating "resources," and not so much of maintaining and classifying them. Still, the equivalent on Wikipedia of our Schools would indeed be what the page calls a "pseudonamespace" of WikiProject. Because we allow subpages in mainspace here, we create "pseudonamespaces" continually.


 * However, suppose we consider going ahead with School reform before having a full namespace vision. It's possible, but I'm sure we will, instead, at least work on a full vision, if not finding complete consensus on it yet. I seem to be coming up with an idea about Topic and was gratified to find that somewhat confirmed in that old WikiProject page. Topic is more focused than School. Otherwise, similar. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:24, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Dave's suggestion that we look at stats is likely to prove useful. You can bet that the University of California doesn't establish a School (Division, Department, College, Institute -- the words get used somewhat interchangeably) with only a handful of students interested. They might run a lecture or lecture series or even a class. Not a school. And the learning activity will be managed by an existing school, usually at least somewhat related.


 * The concept of School as Wikiproject wasn't wrong. The Wikiproject concept, on Wikipedia, organizes users according to topic interest, and allows attention to be brought to subjects by knowledgeable editors, without "canvassing." Here, canvassing is only a problem with certain organizational issues, such as Community Reviews and decisions about advanced permissions. We don't care if you canvass people you think might be able to contribute to a resource. If you do it to add some muscle to your revert warring, okay, maybe it would be a problem. I have never seen that here, as to our ordinary educational content.

There is w:WikiProject:Skepticism. If this were limited to covering articles about skepticism, it would not be a problem. But this project has attached itself to controversial articles, and effectively canvasses for what has been called, on Wikipedia, SPOV, "Scientific point of view." This is not NPOV, in actual practice, it is a highly conservation position that treats a a certain way of looking at life and knowledge as "true." The scientific method is operationally a way of defeating the rule of established knowledge. By consistent application of the scientific method, over time, increasingly solid knowledge is developed. Ordinary skepticism is fundamental to the scientific method, but the primary application of skepticism in the method is skepticism about one's own certainties. What is too often promoted by WikiProject Skepticism is what is termed Pseudoskepticism, which I define as skepticism that forgets to be skeptical of self, and that is only skeptical about the claims of others.

The project attaches itself to topics that "skeptics" have debunked. See this list: w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism/Skeptic watchlists. Naturally, what I notice first: Classified under "Pseudoscience" is Cold fusion, and, indeed, the "skeptical editors" who have long managed the cold fusion article, arranging to revert out, block, and ban editors who disagree with them, have at various times attempted to classify Cold fusion as pseudoscience. However, cold fusion completely fails to meet the definition of pseudoscience, because it is a field with testable hypotheses, and it has been tested (with various results being confirmed or rejected). What is pseudoscience would be some of the claims about cold fusion, i.e., I just heard one: belief in cold fusion is based on confirmation bias, because positive results are reported and negative results aren't. If it were true, and it is true to some degree, it's unverifiable. In fact, however, some researchers report all results, not just positive results. It's a known problem, and there is research that completely cuts this argument to pieces. But pseudoskeptics believe that confirmation bias explains cold fusion results, and they don't look for contrary evidence. Why should they? Cold fusion is bogus, so why bother with anything that resembles hard work?
 * The wikiskepticism project is stupid, but it has a purpose. For me, as long as it is just skepticism, and it doesn't force other projects completely under it. The thing is that it goes too far, for some narrowminded person's intents. The editor tried to merge ALL alternative medicine, tarot, herbal, religion subjects into one wikiproject, and got a lot of opposes. I joked on the proposal talkpage, and upset the editor there. We don't have that stupid reasoning here. Wikiversity editors have something in common, where we are scientific. SPOV is the same as NPOV, isn't it? for laughs- Sidelight12 Talk 17:20, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
 * From the meaning of words, sure. However, that is not how "SPOV" is used. The problem with WikiProject skepticism is that it encouraged skeptical users to collaborate by putting a set of pages on their watchlists, which they then edit, not from an actual scientific point of view, which would indeed be neutral because it is not attached to a position or point of view, but to a "skeptical," "debunking" point of view, typically quite hostile to "belief," and especially any fringe belief or belief considered pseudoscientific.
 * So, in editing those articles they push them toward skeptical sources, they will cite Skeptic magazine, for example, while rejecting mainstream peer-reviewed journal articles, particularly reviews, on the basis that the author is a "believer" in some "fringe position," and they have no clue that it is mainstream publications that establish what is fringe and what is not, not their own opinions or those of their friends.
 * The distinction between skepticism, science, and pseudoskepticism was well elaborated by Marcello Truzzi, see Pseudoskepticism or his bio. Truzzi was a founder of CSISCOP, or originally the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, but resigned because the debunkers were taking over. The debunkers do not generally do scientific investigation, because they already know The Truth. Or if they do investigation, they don't factor for their own belief, creating investigations that are almost guaranteed to come up negative. I could cite many, many discussions. Homeopathy is one of their favorite targets. It appears that in clinical studies, homeopathy "works." However, the theory of homeopathy, in a word, sucks. In double-blind studies, the remedies are indistinguishable.
 * The debunkers are utterly uncurious about the clinical data, because to them, it's all easily explained as the placebo syndrome and confirmation bias. However, WTF is the "placebo effect," and are there ways to enhance it? Many times, I've seen pseudoskeptics come unglued when this is mentioned, because they know that homeopaths are all ignorant charlatans, fooling people, and it should be illegal. I've known quite a few homeopaths. They are all people that I'd love to sit down with for lunch, have a chat, talk about life. I might not agree with them on, say, the physics or chemistry of homeopathy, that's all. I might tolerate a few minutes with a pseudoskeptic. They have been, in my experience, seriously peevish people, full of condemnation of others, humorless. Now, perhaps there are exceptions, but there is a reason why Truzzi bailed. The environment was becoming toxic. I think Carl Sagan had a similar experience.
 * Genuine skepticism is at the foundations of science. It is the opposite of "sure of self." If you look at Wikiproject Skepticism, the main page, it's clear that they are coming from a certainty as to what is scientific and true. That certainty blinds them, just as they imagine that others are blinded by "pseudoscientific beliefs." They don't understand that belief blinds, it's a general phenomenon, and they are not exempt from it. They also confuse faith with belief. Faith doesn't blind, though we may talk about blind faith. Faith is a condition of the heart, not a specific assertion of reality. Faith is not credo. It simply represents trust in reality. I might walk out today and step in front of a bus. But I don't behave as if this is a real possibility, other than being careful. I trust that I won't. It's not a "fact." --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:58, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
 * To me scientific is to be unbiased. Once proof is found there is a reason to make judgements. I don't use the term science to misuse it. I've already said, I know how people like to misuse the word science. Take that lousy Editorial that said 'Vitamins are useless', as an example. Yes, Wikiproject Skepticism did alarm me as bad, but then I thought about it, and realized it is reasonable so long as they don't misuse science (Well of course they do, see below). Wikiproject Skepticism shouldn't take over the alternate projects, as the opposing projects deserve their weight. If skepticism is done, it needs to be fair. I've opposed a similar project to throw religion, alternative medicine, paranormal and other completely nonrelated projects under one project while deleting the project itself. (I joked there that, the person just wants to have one watchlist where he can shoot down everything) On Wikipedia, misusing science is rampant. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:02, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * This leads me to an understanding of what a School might be. By categorizing resources under a branch of knowledge, experts in these branches may be drawn to review resources. Our goal here is not to reject what is "wrong," that is abusive even on Wikipedia, but to classify resources. If a resource is about some fringe topic, for example, it should not be presented as accepted knowledge. If the status is controversial, the controversy should be noted, and, hopefully, covered in detail.


 * A resource may be classified under multiple schools. If one is going for a business degree, or for a medical degree, one might take the same basic math courses as any other student. However, the math courses would be managed, at the university, by the Mathematics Department.


 * The concept of resource management was largely overlooked by the Wikiversity founders. I think they were allergic to it, thinking of management as a way that study is rejected. Hence we can see various actions by JWSchmidt (whom I am encouraging to request unblock) that can be seen as so radically inclusionist as to ignore and encourage even blatantly idiosyncratically isolated resources, useless to everyone seeking to learn on Wikiversity, and abandoned almost immediately by the creator, so, left without any management at all.


 * I created the WV:Playspace concept to handle things like this, that weren't blatantly harmful. The idea is for active users to "adopt" pages in their user space, having these pages on their watchlist, and managing them, at least for a time. This was mostly designed for IP creations, because normally what would be eligible for Playspace handling, when created by registered editors, is being moved into the user space of the creator. The creator might come back years later....


 * We can have a School:Miscellany to handle odd stuff that doesn't fit under existing schools. Whenever a category under that school gets a few examples that are related, we might consider founding a new School. Once we have substantially organized the School namespace, we might then require some process for keeping a new school, rather than moving it under an existing school. I.e, Schools aren't just isolated activities, they are commmunity activities and we will develop guidelines for that.


 * Most users just want to create resources, and what I've seen is that they do not object to categorization and page moves to improve accessibility and maintain project neutrality. When we compare what happens here with what happens on Wikipedia, they are probably greatly relieved that nobody is going to delete their work on their Favorite Topic.


 * The idea of having five or so basic schools, however, is overclassification. While there are overarching categories (Science, Humanities and the Arts), we don't need them to be an intrinsic part of a School pagename. We might informally define Departments, they don't need a namespace, being found in Wikiversity space, i.e., the Department of Arts and Humanities, and School pages would hold categories by Department. One would not need a Department category on every related resource! It would simply be clutter. But categories can be members of these overarching categories. That is very, very little clutter.


 * Our focus at this point, following David's thinking, can become studying the function of a School. I've hinted at it: harnessing the expertise and specialized knowledge or training of our users, to collect resources, identify what might be missing, and so to facilitate creation of what is missing, identify resources by completion so that users aren't directed to stubs expecting to find serious knowledge and activity, creating interest groups. Topics and Portals may be used as part of this process, but I see Schools as being the fundamental tool. Schools are created for systematic training, as communities. That's real-world. They are active institutions, with structures and staff. Topics and Portals aren't that. They have a different function and nature of existence.


 * I'm totally pleased by the participation so far. If we do our work well, we will present a schema to the general community, and it will be adopted with little fuss. We do have an operating consensus, that is still general and not well specified. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:59, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * The project I tried to create was not meant to replace school. It was to make collaboration projects based on the branches of knowledge, and it was to organize knowledge. The structure is important, and its broken down in a functional way. It's a good work, and needs to be preserved. Its not over-classified, it is complex, its like three colors making millions of colors. Each project was a subpage under Wikiprojects. Other reasons for making Wikiversity:Wikiproject lowercase, is because no words have a capital letter in the middle of them, and its time for the word to be accepted already (in wiki-land). Schools are a learning hub, not a collaboration hub. I was trying to form collaboration hubs, and not overdo them. School and topic need to split from Wikiproject, because they weren't used that way. School is successful in readership, so we need to return school to its meaning. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:17, 30 January 2014 (UTC)