Talk:Grants and fundraising

Discussion

• In the good old days discussions like this occurred on talk pages. If this effort to get us on a talk page fails, just go back to the Colloquium.

I think long and meaningless pages are Wikiversity's worst enemy because (1) they are more difficult for the cleanup crew to discuss and evaluate, and (2) they waste the reader's time, especially for newbies who try the links when they should just go back to Google. --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 14:50, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Going through the subpages in order:

• Grants and fundraising/Construction Engineering Research Grant Group is a half-formed description of a project with no supporting material, untouched since 2007.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Funding is a Marshallsumter page, a collage of unrelated quotes about funding, scientific research agencies, and (sigh) dominant groups.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Fundraising is kind of a mess. I think the intent was to serve as a top-level page for projects to obtain grants for Wikiversity, but it lacks focus. (I've already removed a bizarre section where one editor wrote about his "research on money creation" where he attempted to defraud a bank.) Some of the links might be useful, but most of them are broken or irrelevant.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Fundraising/Video Kiosk was a specific project to create a Wikiversity internet kiosk, which never really went anywhere. Probably safe at this point to say this is never happening.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Grant applications is another Marshallsumter page, this one largely about his (failed) attempt to obtain NSF funding to write more pages about dominant groups.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Grants is effectively just a link collection, and all of the useful-looking links are broken.  Delete.
• Grants and fundraising/Raising funds for the arts is a misformatted mess, but the underlying text looks sound. I'm not sure how useful it is - a lot of it looks like it's just stating the obvious - but  Keep for now, or at least give it a closer look.
• Grants and fundraising/Research grant collaboration group looks like an early attempt to create a course about how to write research grants (yay!), but one which never produced any learning materials beyond a course outline and participant list (boo!).  Keep
• Grants and fundraising/Wikiversity nonprofit corporation was a brief attempt to establish a Wikiversity non-profit for some poorly defined purpose. This never got off the ground.  Delete.

There's also:

• Wikiversity:Grants and fundraising/Wikiversity Grant proposals - which I think you might have meant to move to the main resource namespace? - which is devoid of any content beyond a link to a single mailing list post that's old enough to be going to college next year.  Delete.
• Wikiversity:Funding, which is mostly a list of research foundations. The title is misleading, as it isn't actually about funding Wikiversity (which is handled by Wikimedia). I'm not sure what to do with this one; I'm tempted to replace it all with a redirect to WMF fundraising pages on meta.

Overall: it would be great if Wikiversity had some content about the research grant process, BUT we would need a subject-matter expert to write it (and that isn't me). This is a sufficiently niche topic that a useful resource on it will probably need to rely on personal experience, not just summaries of online or print resources.

Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 20:43, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to look at them! I didn't notice any of authors of your proposed deletion lists having made any edits in the past couple of years (and most have been dormant much longer.) That means the articles are no longer a student's learning experience. Erroneous page deletions are a pain to reverse, so I have gotten in the habit of putting stuff in the principal author's userspace. We can't carefully referee everything on Wikiversity, so guessing and moving to userspace is quicker than deliberating and deleting....

Also in favor of moving, is the fact that precedence is a good thing. One of my mistaken removals of a page from namespace was a mistake that someone else made years ago. Both of us chose to move instead of delete. And both of us moved it back. See the two bizzare transclusion pages somebody decided to put in namespace:

• Yes I answered both correctly
• No I answered one or both incorrectly

I added the redirect to userspace and put a warning on it so folks won't move the redirect out of namespace.Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 03:28, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Re: "Erroneous page deletions are a pain to reverse, so I have gotten in the habit of putting stuff in the principal author's userspace. We can't carefully referee everything on Wikiversity, so guessing and moving to userspace is quicker than deliberating and deleting....": A decent solution. Sometimes too kind, but decent anyway. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:09, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, I've moved those two pages back under the learning project they were linked from. They were obviously meant to be part of Instructional design/Learning objectives/Examples and Non-Examples of Conditions Phrases (which links to both near the bottom of the page); there's no need to move them to userspace. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 02:02, 7 January 2024 (UTC)