User:Abd

Big dreams!

Tools

For assisting Big Brother. Ministry of Love approved.

More rodents

Beta users are invited to identify themselves with a rodent image, as I have above. There are many other rodent images on Commons. Drop a note on my Talk page if you would like to claim one of the images here, for this gallery of Beta rodents, or want to suggest a different rodent. After all, besides rats, there are beavers, chinchillas, and many, many others, a vast and diverse and beautiful ecology we have. The rats below are all "pet rats," typically "fancy rats," which are trained from birth to be tame and even affectionate with humans, as well as being amazingly intelligent. They don't talk, but they do respond to verbal suggestions, like many of us.

Mission on Beta

My mission here is as a dedicated and experienced Wikiversitan, to support the formation of language Wikiversities other than those of my native language, English. Each language community, when it is independent, will enjoy almost complete freedom in setting its own policiies, but Beta was formed according to the original Wikiversity vision. As we have learned on the English Wikiversity, "anything goes" doesn't work well, but neither does a heavy deletionist policy. Rather, if any page is defective in some way but has possible educational value, which will be lost if the page is deleted, we use other, nondisruptive organizational techniques to support the creating user(s) and, in particular, their education.

The Wikiversity goal is not only the creation and collection of "educational resources," i.e., documents, but the actual education of users, through "learning by doing," and, I'd add, through collaboration, cooperation, communication, and discussion of topics, as topics would be discussed in a university seminar.

The result is steady improvement of the project with low disruption. Students are not encouraged when their work is deleted! But students (and even teachers, sometimes) mind much less when their work is, say, moved to user space, in the extreme (short of actual deletion), or, with more solid material but inappropriately named or placed, moved to a clear "educational program name," or to a subpage of some such program. In this way we foster project growth, encourage the participation and education of the unskilled, and, in fact, Have Fun! --Abd (talk) 21:08, 31 August 2014 (UTC)