Wikiversity talk:Namespaces

101 "Problem"
101 problem - Not all English-speaking countries number courses starting at 101. "Foo 101" means nothing to some people. It is better to say "Introduction to Foo".

Where I went, they didn't number the courses "101", but I still get the concept. I did courses like:


 * SCC172: Basic Programming Concepts
 * ALG101: Introduction to Linguistics

My point is, the name should be descriptive, but the course code could be anything. For example, SCC172 was broken down as follows:
 * S: Faculty of Science
 * C: School of Computing and Mathematics
 * C: Dept. of Computing
 * 1: First year
 * 72: ??? -- But the first semester courses were SCC171 and SCC172, whereas second semester were SCC181 and SCC182; in later years they indicated different "streams": sets of majors typical subjects (ie. Computer Science vs. Software Engineering vs Information Systems).

Likewise ALG101:
 * A: Faculty of Arts
 * LG: School of Linguistics
 * 1: First year
 * 01: ???

Additional (from another):

In my own experiance even/odd usually designates, in once-a-year courses, if it is offered first or second semester; also, '101' is traditionally reserved for 'Introduction to Foo.'

Personally, I advocate a combined system, on the basis that without some sort of course codes "Introduction to Foo" would come on the list after "General Foo" and "Intermediate Foo," both of which are more advanced courses. However, if you prefix the titles with course codes, they will sort out in the order of how advanced they are. If full course codes are used -- Foo### instead of just ### -- this would also ensure that courses on Foo, Bar, and anything else could be placed on the same list and still end up together.

Namespace Discussion
Has a consensus been reached about namespaces and how they are organized? -- Xlbnushk 02:10, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
 * There has been very little discussion of these matters. The main difference between Wikiversity namespaces and the namespaces of Wikipedia is that Wikiversity has "School:" and "Topic:" namespaces. The way this came about is that when Wikiversity started to develop, academic subject areas were divided into large subject areas called "schools" and each school had more narrow topic areas. Most of these school and topic pages had no real educational content and were like Wikipedia's content development WikiProjects. At Wikipedia, content development projects exist within a "pseudo-namespace"; their names all start with "Wikipedia:WikiProject". --JWSchmidt 03:44, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Xlbnushk 06:28, 10 November 2006 (UTC) -- I gather from what I've seen and from your post on the naming conventions page, however, that discussion has already been held. Why do you say that there has been very little discussion?


 * The practice of having content development projects started spontaneously at Wikipedia. The way Wikipedia deals with content development projects demonstrates that such projects can exist within the "Project:" namespace (Project=Wikipedia). The practice of having Wikiversity content development projects within the new "School:" and "Topic:" namespaces happened "by accident", without any serious discussion. Some people have expressed a sense of confusion over the use of "School:" and "Topic:" namespaces, some people have suggested that there really only needs to be one namespace for Wikiversity content development projects and you have suggested that rather than have multiple "layers" of "topics" (such as divisions and departments) there could be even more namespaces, one for each "layer" of topics. Thus, at least four different approaches to having a namespace system for content development projects have been identified, but there has been very little discussion aimed at trying to figure out which approach might be best. The two existing systems (the Wikipedia system and the Wikiversity system) "just happened", which is not a real argument that indicates these are the best ways to handle content development projects. --JWSchmidt 07:22, 10 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Xlbnushk 15:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC) -- Would you be interested in helping start some official discussion of the topic?


 * Can I suggest adding a "Faculty" namespace - this way you could have a faculty of Law, Engineering & Technology, Arts etc. I'll use the example of Engineering & Technology because thats what I'm more familiar with - adding the faculty namespace would in my opinion lessen the confusion of what to put in each name space because it would be easier to make a consistent standard. For example:
 * Faculty of Engineering & Technology
 * School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering
 * List of subject areas [topic namespace]
 * Individual Subjects [main namespace]
 * School of Mechanical Engineering etc etc
 * This way the divisions in each faculty would be uniform - making it easier for readers to navigate. It also seems to me that it is difficult for people to write content without a formalised organisational structure and some of the content is being duplicated in multiple pages in separate namespaces. Just my two cent spuzzdawg 14:56, 15 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Two "new" (not found at Wikipedia) namespaces have been added to Wikiversity ("School:" and "Topic:") because of the way the Wikiversity project developed at Wikibooks: in a sense, those were special cases. Rather than make a new "Faculty:" namespace we can use portal pages in the "Portal:" namespace. The idea of a portal for organizing large amounts of content is familiar to many wiki users because portals are used at Wikipedia. Even non-wiki websites frequently use portal pages. The idea of a portal is not a difficult concept. The term "faculty" in not welcome at Wikiversity. For many people, "faculty" means teachers who meet special qualifications and who are hired by an educational institution that confers degrees. We do not want to give anyone the idea that Wikiversity has faculty members. "content is being duplicated in multiple pages in separate namespaces" <-- people have to learn the uses of the "School:" and "Topic:" namespaces as the places for Wikiversity content development projects. Yes, sometimes people start developing content on "Topic:" pages. That is fine. It is a trivial matter to move that developing content to a page in the main namespace. --JWSchmidt 18:10, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposals: no subpages in school or topic namespace
"There should be no subpages in the topic portal or school namespaces. Use the template or main namespace instead."

Would this work? Would it hinder or help Wikiversity? Could the template and main namespaces be utilized more fully? --Remi 15:05, 1 April 2008 (UTC)