User:Abd/Starting a Wikiversity and Wikiversity resources

This page is being drafted in Abd user space, intended to eventually become an international resource to encourage the development of independent language wikis. There are approaches that work and approaches that don't work, and, collectively, we have a great deal of experience with both! At this point, this is disorganized notes, as I recognize and remember things.

Participant signups

A course was started here, by an academic. (This can be found by looking at my contributions here, but who it is and the details don't matter.)

Let's say the course was named "My expertise, implications and considerations." The user created a page, "My expertise, implications and considerations: Participants." And he placed on that page his own real name and his web site. For almost five years, people signed up as participants. There are roughly 900 edits to the participant page. However, those signing up followed the model given by the professor: real name and web site.

That, on a wiki course, is almost useless. Further, WMF policy suggests that anonymous participation must be allowed. (for some special purposes, real names can be required, but not just to participate in a Wikiversity course or learning group). This course would have taken off, with far higher participation, if participants had:

• Been encouraged to create a Wikversity account.
• Signups on that page had used the account and nothing else.

As it is, the page history does show many registered users. However, the list didn't show any of that. I saw this situation because the professor deleted all the names, perhaps realizing that it was useless. I have raised the issue with him, and we can rebuild a participant list from those user names, but what can be seen is the need for readily accessible guidelines for starting up courses and other resources. We can be far, far more effective!

Using subpages

As a detail, the professor also followed a common pattern with topic experts and other users unfamiliar with general Wikiversity usage that came from Wikibooks. On WB, there is a mainspace page for a book, and chapters are on subpages, with subpage links. This creates a set of pages that are easy to maintain and understand. Subpage names can be simple, and not conflict with subsidiary pages from other resources. The whole book can be renamed by a sysop with a single Move command. (Individual users may only move one page at a time, but can include attached Talk pages.)

As an example, on en.wikiversity, we often see someone has something like Interesting subject. Then they create a page for a Test, which they name Test. Oops! that's a mainspace page, and will conflict with every other course that wants a test page. So, if they are a bit more sophisticated, as was the professor, they create Interesting subject: Test. Not too bad, at least it will show up with the main name in an alphabetical list. However, this creates a continual maintenance issue. There may be dozens of subsidiary pages. We had a course on en.wikiversity on law in nations. So many resources were created, one for each nation. All independent in mainspace. All really part of the same class project. So we moved them all to be subpages of the project.... And, then, if the project is ever renamed, it is a single command. A list of all pages in the project can be automatically transcluded to a project page with Special:PrefixIndex. And the subpage names can be simple, such as, in the example I gave, Interesting subject/Test. And can be linked from the project page with "/Test or just Test (which has a following slash that suppresses the slash display). (Here, on this page, those Test links go to a page underneath this page, that I created for this demonstration, right now it would be User:Abd/Starting a Wikiversity and Wikiversity resources/Test. When this is moved (if this text is used), the latter, currently a blue link, will become a redlink.

In creating a flat structure with subpage names like Interesting subject:Test, every link must be fully-explicit, which, then, breaks all the links if the structure is moved. And there are many more opportunities for creating bad links.... "/Test," simple.

What experienced Wikiversitans do is to help other Wikiversitans be more effective in structure and presentation and approach. It is not about being "right," and there is often more than one good way to do things. But there are also good ways and ways that don't work as well; often those who create resources are not aware of what it takes to maintain resources over time. --Abd (talk) 19:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)