Talk:Trigonometry

I like trig =]

That is fine - could you also tell: why you like it ? ----Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 15:31, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Page needs review.

• This page was apparently a copy-paste from Wikipedia. It should be edited to be not simply a duplicate of the WP article, it should have a link to the WP article, and then any additional material that makes it fit in Wikiversity, into our educational resource structure. I don't have time to do this today.... --Abd 15:03, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
• Y restarted article. Removed everything that was the same as the wikipedia article. Sidelight12 ^Talk 20:27, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

A bit of disorder here

1. I noticed that there is a Topic:Trigonometry effort that has not been used for a couple of years. I linked from there to here, but not from Trigonometry (here) to there.
2. Although this material duplicates what is found on Wikipedia, the streamlined approach by Wikiversity might be more suitable for most students.
3. I tried to organize this a bit, but am not confident that I made things better. Feel free to revert.
4. But, the page I rewrote Trigonometry/Polar is the way physics students need to think about trig (IMHO). For that reason, I linked to Trigonometry/Polar. Today I had a frustrating day with some under prepared physics students who needed the equations I put on Trigonometry/Polar. There will soon be a link from Physics equations to Trigonometry/Polar.
5. None of these organizational problems are an issue for me or my students. We have an in-house system called Pilot that students is to access materials; they do not need to search Wikipedia. And, they usually go to permalinks, which is what I link to from Pilot. unsigned by Guy vandegrift 00:43, 6 September 2014‎, noted by Abd (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikiversity has two purposes:

1. To create educational resources usable by students, as-is.
2. To foster learning-by-doing, as people who wish to learn about a subject create resources, reporting on their research, or at least ask questions, discuss, etc. (This is why we allow very incomplete resource pages.)

Topic namespace pages, my opinion, should point to functional educational resources, not be educational resources in themselves. Or they can organize study groups, perhaps, covering a general topic. So they may also point to stubs, encouraging development. The links should be distinguished so that those looking for developed resources are not misled, wasting their time. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I looked at the Topic page. Good page, generally. I cleaned up the structure, moving all the original "Lesson" pages to subpages of this page, cleaning up incoming links, and requesting deletions for now-unneeded redirects.

I agree with your assessment of the Topic page. It is good, or at worst, good enough. I have seen people complain about the apparent disorganization of Wikiversity. As you point out, some disorder and/or quality issues are unavoidable. Moreover, both Wikipedia and the collections of Wikimedia images are disorganized. When I search through either Wikipedia or Wikimeda (images), I always usually go through Google. There are lots of good articles, lots of good images out there. The ability of Google to find them helps, as do pages like Trigonometry and Topic:Trigonometry (plus the various category pages). Thanks for keeping tabs on all this.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 16:12, 6 September 2014 (UTC) --guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 16:16, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Guy. As I see the Topic namespace, it's a relatively specific portal. (There is also a Portal namespace. When Wikiversity was founded, there was never a clear consensus on how to organize it, so it grew chaotically, and we ended up with resources of highly variable quality and depth, and with chaotic names. Wikipedians coming here seeing that, commonly think the first thing to do is to delete. For stubs with no development and no particular potential, that's easily done. We don't need time-consuming discussions for it. As we work on organizing Wikiversity, we will develop a stronger sense of how to manage it so that the project becomes more and more useful for design purpose.

One of the key Wikiversity realizations, I think, is that we don't grow the project by deleting the work of students. If a student has abandoned a project, it may be harmless to delete it, but sometimes, not. We never attract anyone by deleting their work. So we move marginal material, where the user might actually care, into user space. It seems, as well, that hardly anyone ever minds their creation being moved to subspace of a more general resource. Hardly anyone ever minds their essay or opinion piece being labelled as such and, often, moved, again, to subspace. They would mind very much if it's deleted; and in the deletion process, the work and the student are often insulted and effectively driven off.

I'm now a bit engaged with Beta wikiversity, where about 5000 pages were deleted in a flurry of activity and involvement, and then .... activity collapsed. It is a good demonstration of how deletion doesn't grow a project at all. We are taking a much more measured approach to cleanup, it's organization, not a massive trip to the dump. Basically, we can have high freedom, opportunities for learning-by-doing, and solid resources prepared and/or improved by experts. We can even raise in prominence the best resources, the most useful. Topic and Portal namespaces can be great for that.

I'm involved in alternative education, in the real world, and students can create their own education, and in an ideal world, experts help out, facilitate, but do not control and dominate (other than natural domination, created by natural respect). This is actually essential for the future. Guide and lead free students, who will appreciate it. Dominate and control, they will reject and undermine and refuse to learn. It's part of the design of "teenager," in fact, and it is a trait, avoiding domination, that is essential for survival. With maturity, it's tempered with other considerations, that's all. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)