Wikiversity talk:WikiProject

A user made a large number of changes to this page, which is an important page for reviewing the history of Wikiversity as to the thinking behind the namespaces here. We are engaged in the process of discussing, at WV:Curriculum committee this very issue.

I reverted, which is not a critique of the changes, I have not even read them yet. We will, I assume, review them, they might all be fine. Or not.

The user also moved the title from "WikiProject" to "wikiproject," losing the original point, which is a comparison of Wikipedia WikiProjects to our Schools and Topics. That is, "wikiproject" is not a generic term, it is a specific term, from Wikipedia usage. I've requested the page be moved back. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:18, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
 * its for simplicity. its inconvenient to type a capital letter p. Wikiproject needs to be a word we use here already. My work needs to be put back. It's a set of wikiprojects, not like schools or topic, as forums and watchpages for these subjects. It's even structured well. and its subpages under this page to be on its own aside from schools and topic. I have to go now. - Sidelight12 Talk 19:40, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I disagree. The better solution would be to add Wikiversity:Wikiproject as a redirect to Wikiversity:WikiProject to support users with typing issues.  The proper name is WikiProject, to maintain consistency for those coming from Wikipedia.


 * I would recommend that your work be restored here on the talk page for discussion and consensus before it is implemented. Being bold is great for content.  It's less effective when applied to policy.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:50, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Right now, I prefer that the page be left as-is, as a document showing what Wikiversitans thought, up to three years ago, which is about when I became active here. We can go over the changes, my revert shows them: . However, depending on the result of our work on the WV:Curriculum committee and what the community does with our work, we might be wasting out time.


 * I did just look, at the first material added (not by date, it's as shown in the collective diff I put up). No, Sidelight, please don't show as a guideline for users what is, at this point, simply your own opinion. We have absolutely not decided to implement that, and I think it unlikely. Hold your horses! We will get there, to what we agree upon. If you think this page is wrong, you can mark it as historical, with a reference to the Curriculum committee page as something we are working on. Or leave it alone for now.


 * I prefer that our discussion of WV organization be on the Curriculum committee pages, to which active attention is being drawn, or on the Colloquium, but, right now, mostly in committee, to avoid massive train wrecks. When we have some coherent proposal, we will take it to the community, and we might iterate this a few times if necessary.


 * Obviously, I agree with Dave about the page name. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:08, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

This page was created by User:JWSchmidt, with only a couple of trivial changes later. If you look, you will see that he's blocked. At the time that he created this page, 2007, he'd have been a shoo-in for 'crat, he declined the nomination after it had effectively passed. Within a year, he was a disaffected, angry user, and how that happened is a study in itself. It had partly to do with God descending from on high to Handle Disruption on Wikiversity. So to speak. That and a similar incident a bit later led to massive loss of user activity here. Many active users lost trust in the safety of this place. Who blocked JWS? The same user who blocked me, without consensus, which stood without review for two years, in spite of contrary requests by other users that were ignored. Not rejected, but ignored, because this wiki was basically dead as to central process, stuff like unblock requests. He liked it dead. "Nice and quiet," was how it was put. (There was activity, there are many users who pay no attention to central process, and they will continue even if the place is exploding, unless and until it affects their pages. Nothing else is on their watchlists.)

JWS created quite a number of policy pages, and sometimes he marked them as policy, unilaterally, without objection, and they stood for years. He did not so mark this page. He wasn't terribly careful about thoroughness. My point is that this page shows his vision, as arguably the major founder of Wikiversity. It should be respected. We can change it, but I'd suggest only with consensus.

His later history is unfortunate, he had difficulty letting go of what had happened to him, much of which shouldn't have happened to anyone, but his own responses were -- I tried to tell him -- dysfunctional. He is an academic, not a wikipolitician, and his major obsession became how Wikiversity was taken over by Wikipedians, and especially deletionist thinking, and "volunteers" here, wanting to "help us out," with technical skills, who would obtain sysop tools, who then freely used blocking and deletion.

All the while, rather strangely, JWS was a Wikipedia administrator. He only lost that from inactivity, when they implemented a new policy to drop inactive administrators. He had a vision of Wikiversity as a haven of freedom, and that vision came crashing down for him, as he saw a good friend blocked and banned and what he saw as freedom of speech trampled on.

I'm in communication with him. On his talk page, you can see that I've suggested he put up an unblock template. I don't want him unconditionally unblocked, probably just as Jtneill did not want to unconditionally unblock me. He wanted assurances that there would be no problems "like before." Instead of going into what was "before," I simply said something quite true at the time, as to my intentions, which was to avoid involvement in Wikiversity governance. I am getting involved, and you might notice I've asked him about that. But I have no intention of asking for advanced permissions. I'm an ordinary user, albeit an experienced and active one, caring about this place.

Jtneill could block me, I could not complain. I'd put up an unblock template for review, that's all, it would be a return to status quo ante. Or he could instruct me. He was my mentor before, he is still considered, by me, to be a mentor, even though I don't necessarily agree with his restraint. I.e, he's allowed situations to continue when he knew better. Still, I can respect that, he believes in administrative restraint, the problem being that we have had administrators who were not restrained. Action trumps inaction, always.

From email, I think JWS might be ready to agree to conditions. Always before, he rejected the idea. He'd not done anything wrong, other than speak out against oppression, so why should he agree to any restrictions? I understand the thinking, but it's limited. We need to move on, sometimes, to make peace, to stop fighting, because the fighting harms everyone, friend and foe.

You might notice that I'm harping on the concept of resource management. We have lots of unmaintained, i.e., unmanaged resources on Wikiversity. Unmaintained resources collect junk, they create a burden for recent changes patrollers.

Wikipedia abandoned the idea of mentors, largely, but without ever really understanding what the proper role of a mentor might be. It would be user management.

That's because Wikipedians, in general, were educationally naive, and the early concepts of wiki freedom were gradually replaced by models involving punitive control. The concept of a mentor as someone who might be responsible for the behavior of a mentee didn't even occur to them. I.e, the mentor would be chosen or at least actively accepted by the mentee, as someone who would support them -- and keep them out of trouble.

Wikipedia developed, without ever realizing it, a concept that there were Good Users and Bad Users, and Wikipedia problems could be solved by banning Bad Users. And they were, every time, sorely disappointed when their favorite Good User became a Bad User. They blamed that on other Bad Users, who had surely provoked their friend to Bad Action. It's a model of life and the world that's highly dysfunctional, being based on blame, and then requiring a kind of control that is not accessible, long-term (get rid of the Bad People!), but Wikipedians are not, at least not stereotypically, highly successful in life. How they think and act on Wikipedia is quite likely how they think and act everywhere, but most of them don't put that together.

They did not develop the concept of an unblocking administrator as being, then, responsible for the behavior of the unblocked user. So, here, when that same sysop who blocked JWS also unblocked another highly disruptive user, based on a promise from that user, made privately and only reported on-wiki, and then the user violated the promise, the reaction of the sysop to a complaint was "Why are you bothering me? I'm not in charge." And indeed he wasn't in charge, except he was. He used his tools freely and when he was challenged, he retaliated. He had power, but refused responsibility.

He was and is a complicated person, to be sure. At various points, he was a hero. Yet I also understand why JWS became so reactive to him. If you care to know, research the history of JWS. It was actually amazing that the sysop who blocked him retained his tools. So, imagine you are JWS. You have been abused, grossly, by a sysop. And the community does nothing about it. You founded the community, it was largely your vision and hard work. How do you feel?

Once before, I asked JWS if he could name a user he'd trust, who could ask him to stop acting, if his friend saw a problem. Maybe that was him, I'm not sure, but I've proposed this concept many times. JWS may have written "Erkan Yilmaz," I'm not sure. Not a bad choice, my opinion.

When I was a probationary custodian I had agreed to User:Abd/Standard stop agreement, which I wrote to cover the situation (and it was used by someone else as well. It was a way to assure the community that there wouldn't be problems. Except it was ignored. When I did something that a custodian didn't like, instead of just asking me to not do that, and I'd then be bound by the agreement to avoid the action, with teeth behind that, a preagreement to desysop at meta, the custodian instead went to meta with an emergency request for desysop. Ah ... same user. It wasn't granted until another custodian here commented with approval. But there was no emergency, and our process had been bypassed. The stewards will do that because, they think, any 'crat can fix the problem, which is true. If you have active 'crats! But this guy was a 'crat... I also had a 'crat as mentor, and he never asked me to stop. But we have inactive mentors here. That should be an oxymoron, we only tolerate it right now, my view, because we are very short of custodians.

--Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:34, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Collaboration forums
Aside from the name change from "WikiProject" to "Wikiproject," covered above, the following material was added and removed by me for discussion --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:59, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

By branch of knowledge
All subjects fit under or under a combination of constructs, science, or humanities. All items in the list should be the top two or three level categories. Keep these 3 levels fixed. If anyone wishes for deeper projects, use taskforce subpages under the corresponding project.

Constructs

 * /Math/
 * /Logic/
 * /Philosophy/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Communication/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Engineering/ (interdisciplinary)

Science (Natural science)

 * /Astronomy/
 * /Biology/
 * /Medicine/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Psychology/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Zoology/
 * /Ecology/
 * /Agriculture/
 * /Sociobiology/
 * /Chemistry/
 * /Geology/
 * /Geography/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Physics/
 * /Engineering/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Medicine/ (interdisciplinary)

Humanities (Social science)

 * /History/
 * /Philosophy/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Communication/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Behavior/
 * Sociology
 * Psychology (interdisciplinary)
 * Ethology (Animal behavior)
 * Sociobiology
 * /Zoology/
 * /Agriculture/
 * /Geography/ (interdisciplinary)
 * /Economics/
 * /Business/

Wikiversity

 * /Maintenance/