User:JWSchmidt/Blog/Start

From Wikiversity

This is an "open blog". Feel free to add your own comments. Please sign anything you add: everything that is not signed is by me (John Schmidt).

Copy this link and paste it into your aggregator.

To do list. 19:34 (12:34 UTC-7), Saturday, 14 November 2009

• cleanup Wikiversity:Content development
• Tutorial about categories, portals, and navigation templates
• Wikiversity the Movie
• something more interesting for MediaWiki:Welcomecreation?

Contents 1 Subpages 2 The Topic namespace 3 Featured content 4 Bugs 4.1 Red links 4.2 Other problems 4.2.1 New Year Cheer 5 Blogs and Wiki Scholar "magazine"? 6 See also

[edit] Subpages

15 January 2007
I'm going to start placing additional entries for this blog on subpages. I want to make some comments on Wikiversity:Reports/15 January 2007 using my blog and then try to transclude the comments to that page.

• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/19 January 2007 - Two "editable box" portals now complete.
• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/18 January 2007/Statistics - The English language Wikiversity has more than 20,000 pages.
• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/18 January 2007 - Create and organize portals.
• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/17 January 2007 - Categorization of Wikiversity schools.
• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/16 January 2007 - Featured content development projects.
• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/15 January 2007 - Wikiversity status at 5 months.

[edit] The Topic namespace

14 January 2007
I did complete my tour of the project ("Wikiversity:") namespace, then I realized that there were additional pages in the "Topic:" namespace that should be moved to the main namespace. So Today I have been going through the "Topic:" namespace. Moving educational content to the main namespace continues to drive up the count of main namespace pages (currently 1,478). There are a large number of "Topic:" pages, the main content development projects of Wikiversity. It will take me several days to get through them all.

[edit] Featured content

10:51, 13 January 2007
This past week I have gone through the entire Wikiversity main namespace in an attempt to put pages into categories and search for content that should be featured. I'm thinking of a system by which each major portal will have featured content and also the Main Page. Today I hope to finish going through the "Wikiversity:" namespace. There are still pages there that were imported from Wikibooks and should not be in the project namespace. When I am done moving those pages to the main namespace, I will try to finish putting a "featured content" section on all of the major portal pages. Then I will put a "featured content" section on the main page.

[edit] Bugs

08:41, 13 January 2007
This is my start of cleaning up my Wikiversity user page. Some of the notes I have been keeping on my user page provide a record of the kinds of problems that I have had with the MediaWiki software that runs this website. This past week there was a period of time during which it was very difficult to edit Wikiversity (see below), so these matters are on my mind. (Wikiversity:Reporting a bug)

[edit] Red links

• Wikiversity:Example - why do external links show as red for the Wikiversity template (that one page only)? (seemed to last about a day, then the problem went away)
• I have seen this happen twice: one Wikiversity page suddenly starts displaying all interwiki links in red. 27 Aug
• Red links update. January 2006. This problem continues. Sometimes the site notice shows red links. --JWSchmidt 17:29, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other problems

• Rendering errors on 24 August such as Image:No text warning.png
• Talk:Current events - side bar change

• A "Wiki does not exist" page was reached several times today (Sept 6) while trying to access a Wikiversity page that does exist (such as this page). Sept 8, still sometimes getting the "Wiki does not exist" page after page requests like this one.
• Sept. 7, two complaints about not being able to create an account: School talk:Geography and Main Page talk.
• 10 September. Failure to insert an image when the Introduction to GarageBand page was rendered.
• 15 Sept. very slow page loads for a while, also was happening at Beta, Wikibooks, meta but not Wikipedia.
• 18 Sept - 23 Sept continuing to have problems with slow page loads, red links that should not be red, "wiki does not exist" messages rather than page loads. At some times Wikiversity takes about a minute to load a page.
• Early October - continuing problems with painfully slow page loads at times, links turning red and image loading has been particularly slow lately.
  
• 

[edit] New Year Cheer

recent server activity

---

18 January - have been getting false "database closed" messages, slow access to newly created/changed pages

---

21 January 2007. Continuing problems with slow page availability after editing.

Database error
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "Article::insertOn". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry '102-Mathematicsnew/Did_you_know' for key 2 (10.0.0.101)".

---

27 January 2007. Continuing problems with newly created pages not displaying. I think this is likely to be very disruptive for new Wikiversity participants. It is absurd that this problem seems to be taken for granted as "normal" by the developers and server administrators.

overflow:auto;X:300px <-- I could not save a page contain this formatting, where X = "height": got a message saying it was blocked by the spam blacklist.

overflow:auto;width:300px <-- This worked fine.

[edit] Blogs and Wiki Scholar "magazine"?

19:27, 12 January 2007
I'm glad that some Wikiversity participants have started keeping both personal learning blogs and blogs for some collaborative learning projects. I tend to make use of my wiki user pages as places to collect links and some editorial comments. Usually that activity is just note keeping for myself. When I became an administrator at Wikipedia I cleaned up my Wikipedia user page. During the past 5 months my Wikiversity user page has gotten rather long, but I find it very useful. I guess I can "off-load" the clutter from my Wikiversity user page to this page and while doing so, document the contents. Also, I have been thinking that it would be more social to have a community effort for essays and commentary on Wikiversity. Maybe there is a simple way to have selected individual "posts" from blogs feed into a central community "magazine".

Hi JWSchmidt, I think the dynamic page list feature used over at Wikinews and requested for Wikiversity might be able to do this job. In the mean time you could try adapting the technique suggested at Learning to learn a wiki way/reflective blog. One problem with this approach is that each blog entry would have to have its own subpage. Mystictim 19:33, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I really do not understand the dynamic page list feature and what it can accomplish. It probably makes sense to have "wiki blog" entries each on their own page rather than in sequential sections on one page. Chrismo indicated that there is a way to set up an rss feed for "wiki blogs" (see Wikiversity Blog howto, User:Chrismo/Blog and User:Chrismo/Blog/rss), I guess similar to what he did for Wikiversity Reports. --JWSchmidt 20:10, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

There's a Mediawiki extension called WikiWeblog, I think it is possible to maintain your own feed like Wikiversity reports but that would be difficult and perhaps inefficient for most participants. I really like the idea of learners keeping a journal, many teachers have told me there's a lot of value in keeping a journal or blogging for self reflective introspection, perhaps learning theorists could elaborate on that. It seems to fit in well with the missions of Wikiversity, some of the other wikimedia projects focus more on developing the works rather then the individual. Chrismo 23:24, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] See also

• User:JWSchmidt/Blog/test