Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/January 2014

Would it be possible to have a mentor (before damaging something) ?

Hello all.

I just get registered on the English Wikiversity as I will have to pass the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) foundation certification next year.

To do this, I will receive soon (beginning of 2014) several resources (books, PPT files, video ...) from my colleagues who are already certified. I will anyway have to synthetize all of them in a single frame and I feel I could do it here in order to let some other people using it in the future if needed.

By the way, as English is not my mother tongue (I am French – hope this is not a roadblock) before starting, I would like to know if I could have like a mentor who may be able to help me by rereading what I will produce and also I could ask for advices (I already have a small experience on French Wikiversity …)

I did not dare to ask on the Information Technology portal discussion as I see the last message was from 2009.

Anyway, I do not expect to start before 2014, but if someone is ready to help me, I would be grateful to him/her.--Sundgauvien38 (discuss • contribs) 14:43, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Welcome, and don't worry. This is a wiki. It's next to impossible to do damage that cannot easily be undone. You already have some sophistication with wikicode. If you think you have broken something, just undo your edit! There are many here who will help you on request. I'm one. –Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:00, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Welcome Sundgauvien38! I'd be happy to work with you on ITIL. There are two relevant learning projects started. See ITIL and IT Service Management. ITSM is the one I'm working on for a course I'm teaching in the spring. If my format works for you, I'd be glad to have the assistance. If you'd prefer your own format, just adopt the ITIL page and start making it whatever you want it to be. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:31, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

As long as you continue good faith and behavior, we will be helpful to you here. You're unlikely to break anything that can't be undone. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 22:08, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello all and thank you for your replies. Sorry to not have answered earlier, but I was on holydays without access to Internet. I feel I will use ITSM as a model and bore Dave Braunschweig (thank you for your offer).

Actually, when I wrote damage, it was strong. The main concerns I feel I will have would be:

1. Bad wording as English is not my mother tongue
2. Misuse of some models.

Now, I just need to wait on Monday to receive the first book. --Sundgauvien38 (discuss • contribs) 14:24, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome to join the project. We can continue the conversation at Talk:IT Service Management. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Random vs. Randomrootpage - A Proposal

I would like to propose changing the Random link in the left navigation menu from Special:Random to Special:Randomrootpage. The effect would be to bring users to random learning projects rather than random pages. Random subpages by themselves are not as meaningful as seeing project root pages, and having more activity on the root pages may lead to better engagement, and hopefully more cleanup and contributions. Is there any support for this proposal? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:49, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

It would be better changed, but it needs spacing in the name. What do you think of having both Special:Random and 'Special:Random_root_page'? - Sidelight12 ^Talk 07:49, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

The finds are better with the proposal. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 07:54, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

"Rootpage" won't mean anything to most users. "Learning project," maybe, "Root resource" might work. I agree with Sidelight that having both would be best. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:28, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

The wording wouldn't necessarily change. If it's a single link, it could still be Random, as in [[Special:Randomrootpage|Random]].

If we have two links, we would need to agree on wording. I noticed most of the sister projects include the resource type (article, entry, page, book, file, etc.). Random learning project is too long for the available space. The options I can think of include Random article, Random page, Random project, Random resource, or just the current Random (single link).

So, the question is one link or two, and if two, what wording? Any other suggestions? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:56, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• We have projects scattered all through the namespaces, with little consistency. So we could have Random Topic, Random School, and Random Resource, as well as Random Page. They could all be useful, and I see no reason not to have them. I agree that this could lead to more cleanup, especially if there is a cleanup project that develops some coherent standards and decision making process. —Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:59, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

It would appear that this is a valid option. Namespaces can be added according to mw:Help:Random page. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:06, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

It is also possible to use the mw:Extension:Random In Category option to select random category pages, such as Random course ([[Special:RandomInCategory/Courses|Random course]]). -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:19, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

What if we add Random as a collapsible section of the sidebar, similar to Community, Tools, Languages, and Projects, and then add the various random links under this collapsible section? This reduces clutter for those who wish to avoid it, and provides more options for those who are interested. Then Course, Page, Resource, School, Topic, perhaps even Portal could be listed. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:29, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

In general it seems Special:Randomrootpage is slightly better than Special:Random. I ran 10 of each. The first yielded an average update year of 2011.2, the latter 2009.4. The first had 3 resources with no categories, the latter had 4. More options where possible I believe would be better. The first appears to be systematically better than the second in how Wikiversity presents itself. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 16:59, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• Randomrootpage is better. we can go with one. It avoids running into bloom clock project (which is good), and school sites so many times. Some hidden subpages will be missed, they should have been organized in the first place(can still be found with effort, and no guarantee using random would find them all). But overall, its good. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 17:41, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh, its already done. That's good. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 17:51, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I've been experimenting with it for a bit. I like the Randomrootpage much better than Random. With a bit of organization, I think this will present a much more functional Wikiversity, without all of the clutter. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

It's easier to find good content with it, and as you said. The old random page could be used as a maintenance tool from userspaces. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 18:13, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Subpages with a missing header page can still be found using 'randomrootpage'. Wikiversity is still unorganized. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 12:18, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Category:Wikiversity cleanup

I think editors willing to edit Wikiversity constructively should look at this category, I don't think this category is paid attention too a lot. So, I will be fixing up pages in here, anybody else may volunteer to help me out. Thanks! --~~Golden_burg111 22:29, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Cool, thanks, Goldenburg. So, I looked at Category:Wikiversity cleanup and the first thing I noticed was User talk:Gerald Ogessa. That's weird, I thought, a user must have included the category in a discussion, but didn't poke its eye out with the colon at the beginning. That will be easy to fix. Wrong.

I clicked on my link and my browser froze. Then it finally unfroze and a script unable to complete error came up. The page was enormous, well over a megabyte. I couldn't find the category on the page, my guess is that it did not all load. Okay, definitely, this needs cleanup!

So I blanked the page, and added a link to history. That way, any categories, etc., on that page don't show up. The page seems to have consisted (almost?) entirely of copies of WV and maybe EN.WP articles. I looked at the user's contributions. Only active September 14-20, 2011. Only one set of edits to other than his user and user talk pages.[1]. This has been common on Wikiversity. Nobody is paying attention.

There were three edits to his user talk page that weren't him:

• [2] and [3], correctly poking out a pile of categories, and, earlier,
• [4] wherein I welcomed the user and questioned what he was doing. He ignored that, and added much more. I would have seen those later additions on my watchlist, but ... I don't recall it.

I suspect this user was using Wikiversity as a scratchpad. Using user space that way isn't prohibited, but using the User talk page is a Bad Idea. As well, as a single large page, the material was not so easily accessible to him. That may be why he stopped using it. However, user space can be used to collect notes, and if they are wiki articles, licensing is satisfied by pointing to the source, best a permanent link. If this is all in a subpage of User, an index can be displayed with a template that show all subpages of a page. While some might think this an abuse of Wikiversity, if there is an educational purpose, as I might suspect for this user, the cost to the WMF is a little disc space, pennies at most, and could be tolerated. But the user was not communicative, and showed practically no interest in supporting this project. I'm tempted to say: Off With His Head! Finished with his notetaking, he left it for us to clean up. If I continue this line of thought, next thing I'll be working with w:WP:WikiProject Spam, off the coast of Wikilandia, enthusiastically yelling "Die, Spammers!" with every salvo, protecting the project that is NOT A BATTLEGROUND. Yeah, right. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:32, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

This is a good idea! I've recently been tagging resources I come across that need cleanup. I personally will be busy on another project. I just ran a bot this evening that identified almost 3,000 orphaned redirects that need to be cleaned up. All redirects that have nothing linking to them. More posted tomorrow. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 04:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Orphaned Redirects

A list of over 2,700 orphaned redirects has been identified and posted at Wikiversity:Orphaned Redirects. Many are simply left over redirects from a page move / rename. Others are intentional redirects to create shortcuts, address common misspellings, etc.

If there are any redirects on the list that you would like to keep (shortcuts, common misspellings, etc.), simply remove the line from the list. No explanation is necessary. If there are any you would like to identify for speedy removal, tag them in bold by replacing the * in front of the item with a ; (semicolon). Orphaned redirects remaining on the list after the end of January 2014 may be deleted. The page the redirect links to will not be deleted.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:28, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Education Freedom Day 2014

Cc: Викиверситет, Викиучебник

Last November, the Digital Freedom Foundation (the organization behind the well-established Software Freedom Day, but also Culture Freedom Day and Hardware Freedom Day) have proposed an Education Freedom Day celebration to take place annually, starting with January, 18 this year, — a pack of loosely-related events organized by volunteer teams all around the world and dedicated to spreading the knowledge of open educational resources (and digital freedom in general.)

Given the Wikimedia Foundation projects’ stated educational aim, it seems wholly appropriate for Wikiversity to participate in the event, even if only by pushing various housekeeping tasks, such as (in no particular order):

• re-visit the list of featured content;
• check for outdated gadgets and CSS currently in use and update them; discuss new gadgets to install;
  1. in particular, the ImageAnnotator gadget may come a useful addition to the project;
  2. the <source /> code fragments are currently rendered in a smaller font than the surrounding text (except when put in a <big />, that is) — arguably, it’d be better to use the same font size (as on Wikipedia) by default;
• check other language sections and other WMF projects for useful practices to adopt;
• translate specific (preferably: featured or otherwise noteworthy) courses from other language sections;
• find and nominate for (speedy) deletion any materials deemed inappropriate for Wikiversity.

Surely, there is no reason not to organize local outreach events to take place at or around 18th, spreading the knowledge of open educational resources, whether related to WMF or not.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 16:02, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Sister Backlinks

I've created a page of sister backlinks (links pointing from a sister project back to Wikiversity) at Wikiversity:Sister Backlinks. So far, it's a list of all Wikipedia pages that use the {{Wikiversity}} template and what they link to at Wikiversity. For those looking for a clean-up project, this is a good opportunity to identify broken sister links and make corrections on Wikipedia to update the links. I can add other sister projects to the list if anyone is interested. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:01, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Sister backlinks have been updated. Any broken links from Wikipedia or Wikibooks main space were corrected or removed. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:34, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikimania, London August 2014

It would be great if we could organise some Wikiversity events for Wikimania. Education is going to be one of the themes. There is a bit about Wikiversity here.

Scholarships available

Please scheck out the scholarships being offered (closing date: )Monday 17 February 2014 23:59 UTC:

• Wikimania Scholarships.

I am based in London and working on WM. If you have any specific enquiries, please feel free to drop a note on my talk page. Leutha (discuss • contribs) 14:59, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Request for comment on Commons: Should Wikimedia support MP4 video?

I apologize for this message being only in English. Please translate it if needed to help your community.

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks community guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. This digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC.

Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).

However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.

We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not to support MP4. Our Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.

Please join this RfC -- and share your advice.

All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.

You are also welcome to join tomorrow's Office hours chat on IRC, this Thursday, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members.

We look forward to a constructive discussion with you, so we can make a more informed decision together on this important topic. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 06:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The organizational structure of Wikiversity

It seems that the founders of Wikiversity had no single clear concept of how to organize Wikiversity. It is clear that the idea of possible resources here was very broad; however, a university is not merely a pile of educational resources and learning opportunities; every university has an organizational structure that facilitates learning.

Since I've been active on Wikiversity, I've been acting to organize resources. The goal is never to exclude material that is possibly educational, and "educational" can include material that is "wrong." We have seen little effort, of late, to delete resources that are perceived as "impossible physics" or the like. Users are generally given great freedom to create essays in user space, and essays as subpages of educational resources related to the topic of the essay are also generally allowed.

However, there is no guidance provided to users on where to place material they create. Because anything that resembles an educational resource is likely to be kept, here, Recent Changes Patrollers don't tag merely inappropriate materials for speedy deletion, and sometimes a user spends years creating an elaborate structure of essays, placed in mainspace, sometimes with radically inappropriate resource names. RCPers only tag obvious spam and vandalism.

Once there is attention to these unorganized creations, they are normally moved to user space. This is far less disruptive than attempting to delete them, and normally WV:RFD can be avoided.

The principle I've been operating on is that mainspace should have, at the top level, only pages representing a course that would reasonably be found in a university or school catalog. Essays relating to a course topic may be in mainspace, but not at the top level. Individual materials used in a course, or possibly studied as part of the course, would normally be placed as subpages. We are like Wikibooks, where we were born, in allowing subpages in mainspace. Using this kind of structure creates a portable resource, if subpage links are used, the entire resource can be moved intact, with a single custodian button push.

My goal here is to set up organizational guidelines for Wikiversity, so that users don't waste time creating what will later need to be moved (or, worst case, deleted). Whatever it is, it should be efficient, and well-explained, so that it's easy to follow.

(By the way, it's not my intention to limit our resources to university-level courses. What I've written would also apply to elementary and high school level resources. An elementary school, however, would not dedicate an entire course to Crocodile. Rather, this would be a subject addressed in, say, a Biology course. Elementary education courses are presented differently than university-level courses, so we might want to create elementary courses in the School project space. I'd really prefer an entire namespace for elementary courses. The present Crocodile page is an encyclopedic article, essentially from an elementary level encyclopedia, plus some educational links or resources. Compare Wikipedia:Crocodile and with our resource.)

Thoughts, comments, complaints, whatever, are welcome. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:40, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

For some reason [[Simple:Crocodile]] failed to link to Crocodile(simple). If you glance at these three Crocodile articles(1, 2, 3), you will see that Abd picked a good example to illustrate the problem. And with three wikis involved, we need to think beyond Wikiversity on this issue. I prefer to think of all these wikis as a giant bookstore. Wikipedia "owns" the front window display, but some of the better books can be found in back. I would recommend placing a prominently displayed link to the Wikiversity article on the (simple) Crocodile article. We should certainly discuss the reorganization of Wikiversity's namespace structure, if only so that people become more aware of the problem.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 17:27, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

To be honest, Wikiversity is still healing. Many blank and lonely pages are around here. We only have one active custodian. The founders were very lazy indeed, (timeline=) Wikiversity started in 2006, Wikiversity was disrupted by Mr. Wales (lol) in 2008, and I was attacking Wikiversity with my sockpuppets in late 2010-late 2011 when I was 7 years old. Wikiversity, now, is still in need of help. Disaster has still been sitting here since 2008. --~~Golden_burg111 18:32, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

The founders did some excellent work. It's very difficult to start with nothing on something that hasn't been done before and organize it well. Even harder to get everyone else to go along with you, even if it is a good idea. Consider Wikiversity:Editor Review, which is a good idea, but hasn't drawn any interest. I would also note that there are at least six active custodians, but most are engaged in developing their own content. This is a volunteer effort. People will spend their time wherever they find it rewarding. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:26, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

I fully support the idea of organizational guidelines, simple and easy to follow. I'm less comfortable on the idea of multiple namespaces, unless we define multiple content namespaces that are included in search results. For example, our many Topic: articles, originally used as course organizers for independent main articles, can't be located with the default search that I expect 90% of our visitors would try. No hit, move on. A more effective use of portals may work, but again there's the search issue, so that we would need to redirect searchable titles to portal pages as the portals are developed. There is a way to configure which namespaces are content spaces on the back end. I haven't seen it yet, but I have seen references to it.

Whatever approach we take really needs to consider two audiences. There are the contributors that we hope will come and help build content, and the visitors that we hope will come and learn from / use that content. A good organizational approach will serve both audiences. Separately, but this made me think about it, I was looking through our [statistics] yesterday, and noticed that apart from a couple of real-world courses, there is almost no collaboration taking place here anymore. Articles have a single author at any given time and very little interaction with anyone else on that content. This was different in the past when there would be multiple co-learners engaged in a project, but for whatever reason it doesn't happen often now.

Ultimately, the organization discussion will come down to whether or not we can all agree on how content should be organized. Is it by resource type? By educational level? Does having multiple namespaces enhance finding what you want, or make it more difficult? Is there other reorganization we should do along the way? For example, naming anything Introduction to _____ just means that no one will ever find it in the search box. I look forward to the discussion.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:13, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

There is no cause for alarm. I just looked at some Wikiversity statistics. The metrics on how much effort goes into Wikiversity articles and number of visitors has been stable for the past 5 years. A pessimist would call this 'static', but nevertheless, the Wikiversity article count is growing at a steady rate (consistent with a static or stable effort). Regarding the disorganization of Wikiversity, Wikipedia is also chaotic. I just found four good articles on relative velocity. Three are on Wikipedia, and one is on Wikiversity! And looking at the history, all four articles are improving. If either Wikiversity or Wikipedia ever disappear, it will be because a better venue for open source sharing of information is found. I agree that we need a way to separate the good from the bad articles, but so does Wikipedia. It's fun to think about the problem, but there is no urgency in finding the solution. Maybe Google and other search engines will continue to improve to the point where the problem of multiple and/or poor quality articles simply evaporates. The bad articles will sit on servers and be ignored by the search engines. That is how the rest of the internet works. What I like about wikis, is that it is so easy to snatch and use the efforts of others.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 03:58, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

On second thought, there is a reason to act now to solve a problem with Wikiversity. If you look at these Wikiversity statistics. You will see that the size of Wikiversity is growing at a constant rate if you count the quantity of articles available to the reader. But the number of edits per year and reads per year are both more or less steady. This MIGHT suggest that Wikiversity is growing in size, but that the ratio of useful to useless articles and getting worse. Perhaps the solution is to be bold by severely editing stagnant projects and not starting new ones. We should also be less timid about nominating articles for deletion.

I personally would like to see us delete articles that are nothing more than a {{Welcome and expand}} followed by a link to Wikipedia, such as Reproductive system. To me, these add no value. There should be some minimum time limit for opportunities to expand, perhaps with the {{Proposed deletion}} of 90 days. But if there's nothing else after that, it's not really a Wikiversity learning resource, at least not from my perspective. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 17:40, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

This thread is about organization. Every action takes time. It is important for us to be efficient. Each case may be different. There are multiple possibilities. I'm on a bus right now, writing on an iPhone, but deletion is just another organizational option, if there is any objection, it's inefficient. We have other options that satisfy the organizational goal. They are easy and normally efficient. They are easily undone, easily reversible. For the deletion option, our active users need a clear guideline, accepted by consensus, so we waste less time in unreliable process. So let's work on the deletion guideline, and if it is already sound enough, work on educating our users. With a clear guideline, we can organize a systematic process to clean this place up. I believe we are very close to consensus on this. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:39, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

I like the idea of propose deletions. And let's all have thick skins regarding proposals to delete articles we have written. If you wrote an article, you probably know much more than everybody else. You might be writing a rough draft that looks like gibberish to others. The policy should be this: If you see something that MIGHT be weak, propose deletion. If someone defends it, he or she probably knows more than you and the article should stay. We are not trying to weed out the off-beat or odd articles, just articles that literally NOBODY cares about. Next time I am nosing around Wikiversity, I will make a point to propose a deletion.--guyvan52 (discuss • contribs) 19:11, 25 January 2014 (UTC) (belated signature)

This will also help, because if I'm the one processing the proposed deletions, I won't delete anything that should be moved under a learning project instead. So, tagging it ensures that it gets addressed. But if you find something worth keeping and want to tag it for relocation, there are both {{Move}} and {{Subpage}} templates that may be used instead. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:56, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Improvements

Much has been improved in a year to recent efforts.

• Delete "articles that are nothing more than a {{Welcome and expand}} followed by a link to Wikipedia" - Dave Braunschweig
• Improve schools and topics which are the equivalent of Wikiprojects and taskforces. Discussion to support rename namespace, simplifying to basic subjects (merging projects etc). I think Schools should be few to cover the major overhead subjects. Science vs politics as two different schools. Math as a school that overlaps with science or economics. Should we change topics be a subpage of schools? This structure lacks simplicity. Topic is a misleading name.
• Improve navigability of guidelines.

- Sidelight12 ^Talk 06:24, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Curriculum committee started

The Wikiversity:curriculum committee is being formed. If you are interested in helping Wikversity to become more coherently organized, and thus more accessible and reliable, while preserving our progressive educational traditions of high inclusion, please join the committee and help develop organizational guidelines. Joining is not a promise to participate extensively -- many of us are very busy --, but it will allow us to contact you. You can always "unjoin," if traffic becomes a burden. Thanks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:51, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you have in mind but I am happy to help when, where, and on what I can. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 00:43, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Great! Start by signing up on Wikiversity:curriculum committee! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:06, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

We need this, but we should be careful not to make too many Wikiversity: pages. We should fix a template for easy navigation. - Sidelight12 ^Talk 03:24, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

I thank Sidelight for joining the curriculum committee, but I'm not sure I understand the problem with "too many Wikiversity pages." Pages in the Wikiversity space are precisely about Wikiversity, as is typical on the wikis, i.e., Wikipedia space on Wikipedia, Wikibooks space on Wikibooks, etc. If there is an extant working curriculum page, we should rehabilitate it, merge it, whatever is most efficient. I'm also unclear on what Sidelight has in mind for a navigation template. Once we have a clear curriculum design guideline, we will, of course, create appropriate templates. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 04:23, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

All of the original navigation templates I've seen were based on a horizontal navigation design. They used horizontal screen space at the top or bottom of the page, or both. Featured examples include Introduction to Swedish. However, from a user interface design point of view, screens are now much wider relative to length (16:9 rather than 4:3). Because of this, I started designing vertical navigation as a sidebar. See IC3 for an example. The idea was generated by the Wikipedia use of sidebars for similar navigation, although theirs is between articles rather than within a learning project. I think this is what Sidelight12 is referring to in terms of navigation templates. He's done some very nice sidebar templates for his projects.

I'll add another comment on organization while we're at it. And that is a recommendation to reserve the Template: namespace for things that accept and use replaceable parameters and/or apply to multiple learning projects. Things such as navigation for a single learning project should be kept within the learning project. There's no advantage to having this type of inclusion/transclusion in the Template: namespace.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 04:57, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

AIUI, virtually the only advantage of using the Template: namespace is that the software allows to preview changes made to the template in the context of another page – which indeed is mainly useful for “parameterized” templates. (But then, who knows if a now-static template won’t be parameterized at some point?) As for the “one project” templates, the Wikibooks approach (IIRC) is to prefix their names with the project’s top page name. That is, – Template:⟨project⟩/⟨template⟩. — Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 17:17, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Templates in mainspace, if not named "templates" in some way, create maintenance difficulties. A tiny edit to a template can do quite a bit of damage, but not look like vandalism at all. We know to be careful about edits to template space. But a page called "Standard," for example, even if under Resource blah blah/Standard, we don't know it's a template. Think of what Recent Changes Patrollers need, and this is Be Kind to RCP month. The Wikibooks approach seems sound to me. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:53, 29 January 2014 (UTC)