Talk:Text editing with vi and vim

Creator's Notes

I decided to start this tutorial after writing this response to a [Question]

Alternatives for deleting this article

@Dan Polansky and Dave Braunschweig: One of you recently edited this page and the another called for deletion. Unless somebody talks me out of it, I am going to blank this page and add links to Wikibooks:Learning_the_vi_Editor and Wikipedia:Vim (text editor). The Wikibook gets about 190 views per month, and their mission is nearly identical to ours. If we want to support "learn by doing" we should link to Wikibooks and leave an almost blank page with an invitation for contributors, or at least encourage students to use Wikiversity to document their progress as they learn.

You may comment here or post on the Colloquium. But silence is consent. If nobody objects, I will blank this page and add an invitation for contributions on this page, and probably create a template for other pages like this one. Blanking the page (instead of deleting) will give the next person the opportunity to not start with a blank page. Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 06:52, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it is preferable to delete content-free pages than create all those soft-redirects to Wikipedia and Wikibooks. Since, what singles out the pages to be so included in Wikiversity from those to be excluded? I could start creating e.g. Feline, Desert and Volcano using this soft-redirect model, and proceed in volume; I do not see value in this.

I see no benefit in a person starting with an existing non-blank page provided there is no content in the non-blank page anyway. Thus, I do not see the benefit of a page de facto/as if stating "nothing to see here" over a non-existing page. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 07:10, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Guy vandegrift: Having been away from this for awhile now, I am more convinced than ever that the most effective Wikiversity content is content focused on Learning by Doing. In this case, that would be hands-on activities that lead the user through a series of vi and vim activities. The background content is better maintained on other sites (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, other non-commercial sources, etc.) and can be referenced with a quick link before diving into the hands-on activities.

I would leave the PROD in place and delete the content if no one else saves it between now and then. If they do save it, they should be willing to add the hands-on activities that aren't here yet.

@Dan Polansky I agree. And, surprisingly to me, people who do want to add content do better with a blank slate than they do trying to edit someone else's content. I used to have students create content as part of their class assignments. I could have a class create an entire course in a semester if I gave them an outline. But I couldn't get the next semester's class to improve that content. They didn't know how to make it better, even though there was much less to do once they had something to work from. If a page doesn't add value, we can delete it. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

I have lots of comment/questions:

1. I agree that a blank page with blank history is the most inviting page for people to begin. If someone has been active on WV in the past couple of years I have been moving the article to their page. I need to rethink that policy if it interferes with giving newbies a blank slate. I need to look into the history of moved pages, but my understanding was that it left the original page with a one-line history statement saying that the page was moved.
2. Recently I have been moving top-level namespace pages into subpages, especially when the subspace contains a collection of essays. I am a strong advocate of encouraging students to create pages of almost any format and allowing them to stay on Wikiversity in some fashion. I have no objection to a policy that all such student efforts belong in userspace (though I don't see why we would want to do that.)
3. On the issue of Wikiversity hosting "background content": I made many efforts to create background physics content in the past, and I must admit that none of have ever achieved a page count that resembles the counts that Wikipedia articles receive. There is a murky grey are here, because students what "learn by doing" includes learning to write expository (non-fictional) prose. That would include learning to write Wikipedia articles. I remember one of our editors writing such pages as a child on Wikiversity. Personally I think the solution is to collect such pages and group them in subpages of namespace. This would give people an opportunity to read articles similar to their own. Do we all agree expository prose, short stories, and poetry is welcome as student efforts, provided they are labeled as such and reside in subspace?
4. Here is a good example of an encyclopedic resource that I see no reason to delete. It came to my attention when someone asked me to deal with the Category:NowCommons. Social Victorians/People/Pembroke looks encyclopedic. But it's in subspace, and probably well written (I'm not interested in reading it.) But since nobody visits the page, it is not likely to embarrass Wikiversity even if it is trash. Am I correct in saying that we only want to suppress Wikipedia-like articles in mainspace?--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 22:18, 6 January 2024 (UTC)