Help talk:Essay

Origins of the essay resource type

The following is perhaps of interest to action researchers. There are four main immediate sources for the idea of an "essay" resource type on Wikiversity. (1) User:SRego's Design for the Environment project of Spring 2008 (with about 100 to 150 participants and a very high level of content creation).(2) User:CQ's essay contest idea of October 2006, which was the origin of the essay category, and which was forgotten. (3) Wikipedia essays. (4) The rather obvious general experience that Wikiversity users were frequently using the main namespace for opinion pieces in an unregulated fashion - by defining a number of opinion-piece types, a more regulated approach to NPOV exceptions might be attained. --McCormack 12:25, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

location of essays

If I would like to release my essays written as an undergraduate student here on Wikiversity, should that be in userspace (e.g. "user:UserName/EssayTitle") or somewhere in mainspace (e.g. "essay:EssayTitle")? I do not see a standardized suggestion for this. I think it would be a bad idea to publish essays to Wikiversity directly under their titles without a colon prefix, since college essays are very common and often on repeated topics (and individual titles can be very arbitrary). I think grouping them under an "essay:" prefix or placing them in userspace would prevent overcluttering mainspace with what would likely eventually become a large amount of confusingly similar-looking material. Nicole Sharp (discuss • contribs) 20:06, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Essays at Wikiversity are most often placed as a subpage under the subject of the essay. See Controversies in Science, Federal Writers' Project - Life Histories, Landmark Education, and Physics/Essays for some examples. There is no advantage to putting Essay: in the title. We don't have an Essay: namespace. We use subpages to reduce clutter.

If putting all of the essays together by title makes sense, then it would be as subpages of Essays, but putting them under the corresponding subject would be more helpful for those looking to learn about that subject rather than essays in general. Adding Category:Essays to each page would allow anyone looking for essays specifically to be able to find them. You are also welcome to put them in user space, but keep in mind that user space is not searched by default and wouldn't be linked to from anywhere except your own user pages. In other words, you wouldn't really be sharing them with anyone, which limits the benefit of publishing them.

Note that, in general, questions like these are best posted in the Colloquium. Most talk pages on Wikiversity are not monitored. I only saw this one because the Help:Essays page is a prime target for spammers selling essay "services". -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 22:03, 7 June 2016 (UTC)