Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/January 2022

Tutorials accepted here?

Hello, I was wondering if tutorials like how to upgrade windows, etc. would be acceptable, or only school subjects like electronics and history are used to create content here. Thanks in advance. Lightbluerain (discuss • contribs) 13:40, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lightbluerain: Operating system installation is a school subject. See IT Fundamentals, Windows Server Administration, and Linux Administration for examples. Yes, tutorials are welcome at Wikiversity. Be sure to reference any sources used. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:51, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Ok. Thanks. Lightbluerain (discuss • contribs) 17:23, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

A Proposal for a Child-Oriented Portal and Content.

I'm a retired teacher who has always had an interest in creating educational material.

I would love to see a portal specifically designed to capture the imagination of children and draw them in with fascinating content.

Many top-level pages on educational sites are too text-heavy and difficult to navigate for younger learners.

I'd like to see a highly visual and enticing portal that would draw young people in, linking to content that maintains their interest.

I'm thinking of the "Hole in The Wall' project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra#Hole_in_the_Wall but with content specifically designed to attract, retain and and guide attention.

I personally have interest in the fields of evolution, mathematics and virology.

With evolution, particularly, much money has been put into slick material aimed at the young by creationist for-profit organisations such as Ken Ham's "Answers in Genesis". https://answersingenesis.org/kids/ We need something like this for teaching real science!

Can anyone suggest to me where to go to start getting this off the ground?

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Barry Desborough (talk • contribs) 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Barry Desborough: Welcome! Wikibooks has a Wikijunior area that averages 100 views a day. Something like that might be a good model to follow. As for how to start, pick a name and then create a Portal: to match. Add content. When you have enough content to advertise, we can add it to the main page, first as news and eventually as a link at the top as interest grows. Let us know whenever you have questions or need suggestions. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:32, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

See Portal:Primary Education and Portal:Secondary Education - maybe these portals may be of your interests. —Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 21:41, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Barry Desborough: As Dave mentions above, Wikijunior is a space for textbooks aimed at youth. There is also a simple English Wikipedia that may include some child-appropriate content. See m:Wikikids to see discussion about a project focused on youth learning that did not pass and some relevant links at the top of that page. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:28, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore is back!

Please help translate to your language

You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 28th of February.

You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.

You can also organize a local contest in your country and support us in translating the project pages to help us spread the word in your native language.

Feel free to contact us on our project Talk page if you need any assistance.

Kind regards,

Wiki loves Folklore International Team

--MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 13:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2022

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is now open!

This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 23 January, or comment on other proposals to help make them better.

The communities will vote on the proposals between 28 January and 11 February.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Call for Feedback about the Board of Trustees elections is now open

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

More languages • Please help translate to your language

The Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections is now open and will close on 7 16 February 2022.

With this Call for Feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team is taking a different approach. This approach incorporates community feedback from 2021. Instead of leading with proposals, the Call is framed around key questions from the Board of Trustees. The key questions came from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election. The intention is to inspire collective conversation and collaborative proposal development about these key questions.

Join the conversation.

Best regards,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Xeno (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 01:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Please note an additional question has now been added. There are also several proposals from participants to review and discuss. Xeno (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 00:23, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Question about the Affiliates' role for the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

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Hi All,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections so far. The Movement Strategy and Governance team has announced the last key question:

How should affiliates participate in elections?

Affiliates are an important part of the Wikimedia movement. Two seats of the Board of Trustees due to be filled this year were filled in 2019 through the Affiliate-selected Board seats process. A change in the Bylaws removed the distinction between community and affiliate seats. This leaves the important question: How should affiliates be involved in the selection of new seats?

The question is broad in the sense that the answers may refer not just to the two seats mentioned, but also to other, Community- and Affiliate-selected seats. The Board is hoping to find an approach that will both engage the affiliates and give them actual agency, and also optimize the outcomes in terms of selecting people with top skills, experience, diversity, and wide community’s support.

The Board of Trustees is seeking feedback about this question especially, although not solely, from the affiliate community. Everyone is invited to share proposals and join the conversation in the Call for Feedback channels. In addition to collecting online feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team will organize several video calls with affiliate members to collect feedback. These calls will be at different times and include Trustees.

Due to the late addition of this third question, the Call will be extended until 16 February.

Join the conversation.

Best regards,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Xeno (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 00:23, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech

Hello

We, the team working on the Community Wishlist Survey, would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. It will take place on 19 January (Wednesday), 18:00 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. This external system is not subject to the WMF Privacy Policy. Click here to join.

Agenda

• Bring drafts of your proposals and talk to to a member of the Community Tech Team about your questions on how to improve the proposal

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes without attribution will be taken and published on Meta-Wiki. The presentation (all points in the agenda except for the questions and answers) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, Spanish, and German. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the Community Wishlist Survey talk page or send to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Natalia Rodriguez (the Community Tech manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

• Join online
• Meeting ID: 85804347114
• Dial by your location

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Subscribe to the This Month in Education newsletter - learn from others and share your stories

Dear community members,

Greetings from the EWOC Newsletter team and the education team at Wikimedia Foundation. We are very excited to share that we on tenth years of Education Newsletter (This Month in Education) invite you to join us by subscribing to the newsletter on your talk page or by sharing your activities in the upcoming newsletters. The Wikimedia Education newsletter is a monthly newsletter that collects articles written by community members using Wikimedia projects in education around the world, and it is published by the EWOC Newsletter team in collaboration with the Education team. These stories can bring you new ideas to try, valuable insights about the success and challenges of our community members in running education programs in their context.

If your affiliate/language project is developing its own education initiatives, please remember to take advantage of this newsletter to publish your stories with the wider movement that shares your passion for education. You can submit newsletter articles in your own language or submit bilingual articles for the education newsletter. For the month of January the deadline to submit articles is on the 20th January. We look forward to reading your stories.

Older versions of this newsletter can be found in the complete archive.

More information about the newsletter can be found at Education/Newsletter/About.

For more information, please contact spatnaik{{{1}}}wikimedia.org.

---

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony ^(Talk), Saturday 7:01, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Movement Strategy Implementation Grants

Skill development has been targeted for this year's Movement Strategy Implementation Grants. See meta:Grants:MSIG/Examples/Skill Development Activity for more information and to apply. By the way, this information came to us through a post on our Wikiversity:Discord channel. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:43, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Dave Braunschweig. Our implementation specialist fielding grant requests expressed a willingness to meet at any stage of idea development. Interested contributors should feel free to reach out (to me or via m:Grants:MSIG/Contact) to schedule a meeting. We recently published a "Diff blog" post about these efforts, and list some community projects that are already moving forward. I appreciate you highlighting this topic here (and hope that it leads to some useful learning material surrounding movement strategy and governance!). Xeno (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 00:29, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Question about the Affiliates' role for the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections

Hi All,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections so far. The Movement Strategy and Governance team suggested another question was still under discussion. As of today, we announce the last key question:

How should affiliates participate in elections?

Affiliates are an important part of the Wikimedia movement. Two seats of the Board of Trustees due to be filled this year were filled in 2019 through the Affiliate-selected Board seats process. A change in the Bylaws removed the distinction between community and affiliate seats. This leaves the important question: How should affiliates be involved in the selection of new seats?

The question is broad in the sense that the answers may refer not just to the two seats mentioned, but also to other, Community- and Affiliate-selected seats. The Board is hoping to find an approach that will both engage the affiliates and give them actual agency, and also optimize the outcomes in terms of selecting people with top skills, experience, diversity, and wide community’s support.

The Board of Trustees is seeking feedback about this question especially, although not solely, from the affiliate community. Everyone is invited to share proposals and join the conversation in the Call for Feedback channels. In addition to collecting online feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team will organize several video calls with affiliate members to collect feedback. These calls will be at different times and include Trustees.

Due to the late addition of this third question, the Call will be extended until 16 February.

Join the conversation.

Best,

Movement Strategy and Governance --Mervat (WMF) (بحث) ‏۲۲ ژانویهٔ ۲۰۲۲، ساعت ۱۵:۰۰ (UTC)

External link to Khan Academy

Could we add external links to topics' corresponding Khan Academy topic?

I was thinking about proposing a Wikidata property to link topics between Wikidata and Khan Academy and Wikiversity could take advantage of this. Lectrician1 (discuss • contribs) 21:14, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lectrician1: There are pages that have links to Khan Academy resources. So, yes, external links to Khan Academy topics are allowed. We wouldn't want pages that are exclusively redirects to Khan Academy. See JavaScript Programming/While Loops for an example of a lesson that uses Khan Academy for background learning on an activity.

In general, we want to provide a variety of sources and/or resources for learning. Free and open Wikiversity content is preferred, then other free and open resources, and finally other free sites as appropriate.

I'm not sure how this would connect with Wikidata. That may be a question for Wikidata rather than for here. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:28, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Links to Khan Academy and a variety of other sources are totally appropriate because the goal is to get free (free culture and free-as-in-cost) educational resources to others. If you think it would be useful, I can make a template for linking and that can track which pages here have links to Khan Academy. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:45, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Desktop Improvements update and Office Hours invitation

Hello. I wanted to give you an update about the Desktop Improvements project, which the Wikimedia Foundation Web team has been working on for the past few years.

The goals of the project are to make the interface more welcoming and comfortable for readers and useful for advanced users. The project consists of a series of feature improvements which make it easier to read and learn, navigate within the page, search, switch between languages, use article tabs and the user menu, and more.

The improvements are already visible by default for readers and editors on 24 wikis, including Wikipedias in French, Portuguese, and Persian.

The changes apply to the Vector skin only. Monobook or Timeless users are not affected.

Features deployed since our last update

• User menu - focused on making the navigation more intuitive by visually highlighting the structure of user links and their purpose.
• Sticky header - focused on allowing access to important functionality (logging in/out, history, talk pages, etc.) without requiring people to scroll to the top of the page.

For a full list of the features the project includes, please visit our project page. We also invite you to our Updates page.

The features deployed already and the table of contents that's currently under development

How to enable the improvements

Global preferences

• It is possible to opt-in individually in the appearance tab within the preferences by unchecking the "Use Legacy Vector" box. (It has to be empty.) Also, it is possible to opt-in on all wikis using the global preferences.
• If you think this would be good as a default for all readers and editors of this wiki, feel free to start a conversation with the community and contact me.
• On wikis where the changes are visible by default for all, logged-in users can always opt-out to the Legacy Vector. There is an easily accessible link in the sidebar of the new Vector.

Learn more and join our events

If you would like to follow the progress of our project, you can subscribe to our newsletter.

You can read the pages of the project, check our FAQ, write on the project talk page, and join an online meeting with us (27 January (Thursday), 15:00 UTC).

How to join our online meeting

• Join online
• Meeting ID: 89205402895
• Dial by your location

Thank you!!

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Is there a wikitext equivalent for "target [equals] _blank" ?

I want a link to an external site to open in a new page or tab. How do I accomplish this goal? Thanks!   - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) 01:31, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

There is no equivalent at the MediaWiki level, this would have to be done at the server level. Note that this can be done with HTML, JavaScript and JQuery. Ostensibly, you can do it with CSS, but it's unsupported: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_target-new.asp. Either way, it's generally best to not force users to open in a new target if they don't want to, so I would recommend including this as inline text if it's really somehow necessary. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:39, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Question about Citation templates for a collaborative class project

I've created a draft page for a graduate-level class project in public folklore, called Laneways of Harbour Grace. Currently, the page has only the Basic option for Manual citations. How do I include the other citation templates that are standard in wikipedia? Is there someone who could walk me through this, or help me set it up if it is possible to do so? Thanks!

--HeritageNL (discuss • contribs) 23:16, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@HeritageNL: Hi, I'm Justin, one of the curators here at Wikiversity. Can you tell me more about the citation style you would like to have on the page? There is no set style that is mandated here, so we can definitely accommodate whatever style is consistent with your other materials. It sounds like you're familiar with Wikipedia, so you may be able to use templates located here: Category:Citation templates. If you still have questions, post here and if you write {{Ping|Koavf}}, I will be notified, using the same method I just used at the beginning of this comment. Thanks for visiting and let me know how I can help. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! @Koavf: Cite journal; Cite news; Cite web; and Cite book would be most useful. I know you can add them from the Insert > templates button on the toolbar; is there a way to add them to the Cite button? HeritageNL (discuss • contribs) 00:10, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@HeritageNL: Gotcha: thanks for being patient with me. First off, I don't use the VisualEditor, so I don't personally use that button or method often and I'm not an expert. Two options: if you use the VisualEditor and start by inputting a certain kind of media, then the website will assume or recommend a certain template. That suggestion may not always be perfect, but if you use an ISBN (e.g.), you should get cite-book. I'll note that I used a URI and got "cite-journal" instead of "cite-web", so I don't think this is the most reliable method. The second option is to "Edit source" and then manually insert a template. The former method seems easier, but less accurate and the latter method is more accurate, but also more cumbersome. If you need help with either of those or don't understand my answer, please let me know again. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:38, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Sorted! Wish us luck! HeritageNL (discuss • contribs) 02:00, 29 January 2022 (UTC)