User talk:Leighblackall

From Wikiversity

Hi there! I look forward to taking with you. Please add new topics to the top of my talk page. Thanks :)

[edit] Nomination for Probationary Custodianship

Hi Leigh,

I've nominated you here for probationary custodianship: Wikiversity:Candidates_for_Custodianship#Leighblackall. Could you indicate there whether you accept and who you would like to be mentored by? Sincerely, James - -- Jtneill - Talk - c 01:31, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Hey Leigh, that's great news - check out the link above - just add a "yes please" to that page and hopefully we can get underway

. Sincerely, James - -- Jtneill - Talk - c 04:05, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Done This begins the 4 week period of probationary custodianship. [1] Good luck with the mop! --mikeu ^talk 12:45, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

If you have any questions or would like some advice you can drop by #wikiversity-en, where you can frequently find me and other custodians. Also, please add yourself to WV:STAFF as a probationary custodian with timezone and babel info. --mikeu ^talk 12:59, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

BTW, babel refers to language fluency. EN is native speaker of English, and FR-1 is basic knowledge of French. See User:Jade Knight's page for an example of how this is sometimes used. It is a very handy system on multilingual wikis like betawikiversity: or for language learning project participants. --mikeu ^talk 01:33, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi Leigh, whilst by no means compulsory, also consider participating in, and contributing to, this learning project: How to be a MediaWiki sysop. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 23:55, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Explicit content

Good questions/comments. I'm not sure, but I've asked about more about this here: Wikiversity:Request custodian action#Removing explicit content. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 07:06, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I have added that image to MediaWiki:Bad image list which prevents it from appearing in the page history [2]. We don't get this sort of activity very often, but it has occured a few times recently. As Jtneill mentioned we are discussing ways to prevent this in the future. Wikiversity custodians don't have any direct control of what is hosted on commons. However, anyone at wikiversity can go to commons and request that a file be deleted. The official policy on such matters can be found at Commons:Project scope which in part states:

"The counterpoint to that is that the statement “Commons is not censored” is not a valid argument for keeping a file that falls outside the permitted Commons scope, as set out above. Photographs of nudity and male and female genitalia are sometimes uploaded for non-educational motives, and such images are not exempt from the requirement to comply with the rules on scope. Often (but not always) such images add nothing educationally distinct to the stock of such images we hold already, and hence fail the test of being realistically useful for an educational purpose."

Given that this image is not used on a single wikimedia project [3] and that Commons also has a policy about "Files apparently created and/or uploaded for the purpose of vandalism or attack" should make this is a good candidate for deletion. Having said that, I have also seen debates on wiki where the justification for keeping such material is based on rather spurious arguments. --mikeu ^talk 20:54, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

If an image is in MediaWiki:Bad image list that will prevent it from appearing on any current page or any history page. The image will simply not be visible anywhere on wikiversity. However, this is not a manageable solution to the problem. Trying to keep up with the new images that get uploaded to commons would be impossible. And mostly pointless, since almost none of those images get used to vandalise a page here. (There are only 5 entries on the bad image list, just to give you an idea of how rare it is.) I see this problem as being a subset of a larger problem which is malicious editing to disrupt the site. This might also be done by inserting vulgar language or by changing the layout of the page so that it is unreadable, for example. In a few recent cases there were users who inserted these images in many pages. The response we take is to block the user from editing and cleanup the mess. There are some automated methods for preventing this. But mostly we really on volunteers to quickly stop and revert this activity. Given the small size of our community it is not always possible to handle this as rapidly as we would like. I'd be interested in exploring other possibilities for handling this. There have been many discussions on wikimedia sites about explicit images and vandalism. I'll try to find some links to those pages. --mikeu ^talk 22:47, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is a page that summarizes some of the previous discussions on the topic. While much of it is specific to wikipedia, there are some points that are more general about wikimedia sites. There is also a discussion on implementing a technical means to filter out explicit content. BTW, I did tag the image that was on your page for speedy deletion, FWIW. --mikeu ^talk 13:33, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

The file has been deleted from Commons for being "out of project scope." [4] --mikeu ^talk 22:16, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Talk

FYI, I redesigned my talk page header a little - see what you think possibly as a template for others. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 00:56, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lecture 2.0

Have you got some ideas for Lecture 2.0? How does Otago do it? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 01:54, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] RSS feed

FYI, unfortunately, the RSS extension is not currently available on WV. It is available on the sandbox server (which you can access), but I'm not sure how useful that is. Unfortunately, further, when I looked into it, it seemed unlikely to get approved by WMF because it would mean unable to directly control content on pages - e.g., if the feed is spammed. Sandbox server: http://www.sandboxserver.org/wiki/index.php?title=RSS_Reader -- Jtneill - Talk - c 06:17, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Talk link in signature

Go to Special:Preferences. In the Signature field, add something like -- [[User:Jtneill|Jtneill]] - <small>[[User talk:Jtneill|Talk]] - [[Special:Contributions/Jtneill|c]]</small>, tick the box, and save. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 09:36, 8 July 2009 (UTC)