Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/October 2012

Hit counter

Is there a Hit Counter available on Wikiversity so that we can find out how many viewings a page has had? If so, please let me know how to activate and use it. Thanks.

Droflet (talk) 10:04, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Hit counter

Is there a Hit Counter available on Wikiversity so that we can find out how many viewings a page has had? If so, please let me know how to activate and use it. Thanks.

Droflet (talk) 10:32, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's what I use for X-ray astronomy. --Marshallsumter (talk) 11:24, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, it's great! Droflet (talk) 14:54, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

And I have now created a template for calling it from any page so that it displays the hits for that page. See Template:PDHitCounter. I created it for the learning project I am working on, The Science Behind Parkinson's Disease, but feel free to copy and adapt it for your own purposes. If you don't want the link to clutter up a normal page, just put the Template on the Talk page and it still displays data for the Resource page (or subpage). Droflet (talk) 13:38, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Official Wikipedia Discussion Forums

I think it's high time that this issue got discussed and refined more openly.

My only gripe with Wikipedia is: "WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A FORUM" - if that is not a glaring problem looking for a solution, I don't know what is.

Several companies have made the jump to creating a comment-chat-type-thing: Disqus, Reddit, Stackoverflow, Slashdot, Facebook... then there are the legacy discussion forums such as PhpBB and vBulletin.

What they all have in common is up/down votes.

I think it's time for the establishment of a forum and standard that can draft an API that can bind these togheter.

That might have been the purpose of the "Semantic Web" - BUT - they are aim too high.

All we need is a simple forum software to experiment on - and once it's mature, link it to Wikipedia.

First we need to analyze types of comments people make: Ie. Agreement / Disagreement Humor New knowledge shared - based on something else ie. linking it to something New knowledge shared - based on this...

.. Ie linking it to relevant fields of study

Allowing people to build and expand knowledge casually, outside the academic publish-peer-review-paradigm.

Crowd-source common-sense knowledge that the public has accumulated through own experience. Or at least helping them find the appropriate place to satisfy their curiousity, ask their questions, learn or share their insights.

How about we make a list of initiatives that attempt to do this, right here?

How about we list the relevant roleplayers and their interests right here?

How about we invite them here, to collaborate and share and how about we start right now?

Somewhere in the world is the perfect person to lead this - in the right direction, to bind all the divergent initiatives together.

Here's my current "best idea" - four "voting" buttons. - or perhaps four columns for comments/discussions. Lets consider the four columns first: Leftmost comments are for agreement/disagreement type comments. Ie "Wow!" "I like this" or "Stupid idea" then a column for opinions and pointless discussions: "They tried this before, it didn't work" - "It will never be possible" - "Maybe we should look at that rather" Then a column for comments relating to things this builds on: "Wow, if not for that, then this would have never been possible" Then a column for comments relating to things that this forms the foundation of: "Wow, this would make it possible to do that"

The four button idea would have just four buttons with counters - a little like slashdot: a funny counter, an insightful counter, ... I don't have time to discuss all my ideas now.

Bottom line is, these can trivially be implemented and experimented with, until an elegant solution is found.

Simply relying on text mining to find "knowledge" is a little pointless and mindless.

--Dagelf (talk) 13:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Upcoming software changes - please report any problems

(Apologies if this message isn't in your language. Please consider translating it)

All Wikimedia wikis - including this one - will soon be upgraded with new and possibly disruptive code. This process starts today and finishes on October 24 (see the upgrade schedule & code details).

Please watch for problems with:

• revision diffs
• templates
• CSS and JavaScript pages (like user scripts)
• bots
• PDF export
• images, video, and sound, especially scaling sizes
• the CologneBlue skin

If you notice any problems, please report problems at our defect tracker site. You can test for possible problems at test2.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.org, which have already been updated.

Thanks! With your help we can find problems fast and get them fixed faster.

Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 02:50, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

P.S.: For the regular, smaller MediaWiki updates every two weeks, please watch this schedule.

Distributed via Global message delivery. (Wrong page? Fix here.)

WMF US and Canada Education Program

"The Wikimedia Foundation formed a Working Group in May 2012 to propose a future structure for the United States and Canada Education Programs. The Working Group, through in-person meetings and task force work, now proposes that the United States and Canada Education Program be operated as a Thematic Organization operating as a fully independent non-profit entity. This request for comment asks whether there is community support for the creation of such a new non-profit organization..."

FYI, read more and comment at w:Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/RfC --mikeu ^talk 03:02, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Fundraising localization: volunteers from outside the USA needed

Please translate for your local community

Hello All,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Fundraising team have begun our 'User Experience' project, with the goal of understanding the donation experience in different countries outside the USA and enhancing the localization of our donation pages. I am searching for volunteers to spend 30 minutes on a Skype chat with me, reviewing their own country's donation pages. It will be done on a 'usability' format (I will ask you to read the text and go through the donation flow) and will be asking your feedback in the meanwhile.

The only pre-requisite is for the volunteer to actually live in the country and to have access to at least one donation method that we offer for that country (mainly credit/debit card, but also real-time banking like IDEAL, E-wallets, etc...) so we can do a live test and see if the donation goes through. All volunteers will be reimbursed of the donations that eventually succeed (and they will be low amounts, like 1-2 dollars)

By helping us you are actually helping thousands of people to support our mission of free knowledge across the world. Please sing up and help us with our 'User Experience' project! :) If you are interested (or know of anyone who could be) please email ppena@wikimedia.org. All countries needed (excepting USA)!

Thanks!
Pats Pena
Global Fundraising Operations Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Sent using Global message delivery, 16:55, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Email Letter of interest to NSF

What follows is a draft of a letter of interest to be sent by email to the NSF program director. I would deeply appreciate any feedback, comments, criticism, or questions on content.

Subject: Interest in a proposal about “dominant group”

Dear Program Director Maling,

If I may, I would like to ascertain your interest in a proposal subject (the two-word scientific term “dominant group”) before submitting the proposal to NSF. A perhaps more readable version can be found at [:http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Dominant_group/Funding].

The concept embodied by the two-word scientific term dominant group may be primordial to human society, culture, and language. Searching context and usage of the term and its relative synonyms in contemporary and extinct languages, and those languages on the verge of extinction may reveal important facts about this concept. It is sometimes the case that a language is on the verge of extinction precisely because of the presence of a dominant group, especially one engaging in monopolistic or oligopolistic practices.

Dominant group may represent a force for extinction in the evolution and application of language, specifically terminology, to the real and imaginary world.

Intellectual merit

The current activity is exploratory in nature and is resulting in an advance of knowledge and understanding about the term dominant group and its uses within various fields. The identification of its own field may result; thereby, in allowing differentiation of other fields so as to determine how knowledge is advanced across those different fields. It's like differential equations. Although differential equations is a subject within mathematics, it's spread to other subjects such as physics with ensuing use advancing knowledge within physics. Differential equations is a two-word scientific term.

Advancing knowledge and understanding

The proposed activity consists of finding the origin of dominant group or one of its relative synonyms, defining the two-word scientific/technical term perhaps from context (lexical pragmatics) (or perhaps rigorously), determining why scientists outside biology (especially evolution or entomology) use the term, and verifying its divergence and radiance by examples.

The field of dominant group appears to be regions, or the science of regions. Within a region in any science, including the social sciences, there may be a dominant group. Each region is defined by its limits. These limits in turn may allow for a dominant group. Change the limits (characteristics) for any region and the dominant group may go extinct. If a regional genome in biology lacks the potency to take advantage of any change in regional characteristics, there will be no dominant biological group.

In each field of use

Part of the proposed activity is to determine how dominant group advances knowledge and understanding within each field which may be considered its own field or across all these different fields.

Dominant group is already being used as a scientific/technical term to advance knowledge and understanding across a great many fields.

In theory, dominant group in any field may have at least two uses: (1) a group of field-based entities, sources, or objects, or (2) a dominant group in some way associated with that field.

In practice, depending upon the scientist's intent, dominant group may be the bad group that engages in monopolistic practices, or socially negative behavior such as discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional possible criminal activity against other demographic groups.

It can also serve as an empirical identifier in observations. At one extreme, it is 100 % of the effect or phenomenon under study. At the other, it is a minority group effect that perhaps has some natural or artificial unfair advantage. In a society a dominant group often has an unfair advantage such as numbers, military power, or assets and money. Here's an example of how searching and using the power of the internet can bring about remarkable discoveries.

In an article that appeared in the American Scientist (May-June 2012) issue entitled "Herschel and the Puzzle of Infra-red", "Jack White mentions that it is not known who coined the term "infrared.""[1] "A Google Books search for "infra-red" finds two articles published in April 1874, both of which use the term in the context of Edmond Bacquerel's treatise on light."[1] There is an 1867 work using the French infra-rouge and one in English near the same time using "infra-red", "having translated it from the French."[1]

The author responds that "ultra red" and "infra-red" appear in a paper from 1873, researched in 1960 "in the dark ages before the Internet. Rosenberg's find is a reminder of the Internet's amazing, growing power to search original works in different languages."[2]

Evolution

The term dominant group and perhaps the concept the term represents have been an integral part of nearly every theory of evolution.

Hypothesis: As an evolutionary process, a dominant group may be a force for extinction by driving a number of groups to extinction and a force for speciation when spatial or temporal dispersion creates diversity and isolation which may eventually produce new groups. As a force for extinction a particular dominant group may also through its actions on other groups ultimately produce its own extinction event. This departure from a zone then allows other groups to fill the niche.

Changes in the characteristics or properties of a region may force the dominant group into extinction; thereby, making room for the next dominant group. However, some changes may not allow a dominant group to emerge. Additionally, properties of dominance may be appearance only. No competition for resources may have occurred.

Lexical pragmatics

From a metadefinitional point of view, each use of dominant group has a relationship between members of the dominant group, a population from which the dominant group is a subset, a criterion for dominance, and a region, range, distribution or "in their own country". But, each of these four structures may have their meaning in the context within which the author or speaker places the two-word scientific/technical term.

Proposer qualifications

Much of the explorational data for reviewer evaluation sits within the resource structure and substructure of the dominant group research project displayed in the template entitled "Dominant group" near the bottom of the page [:http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Dominant_group/Funding].

Initial efforts using the scientific method may be found within the effort to demonstrate proof of concept.

Transformative concepts

"[T]wo-word glossary items are the most common technical terms".[3] Dominant group is a likely two-word glossary item captured by data mining algorithms. A first-principle's demonstration that dominant group is a two-word scientific/technical term yields one test standard for data mining algorithms to find.

Dominant group serves as an indicator that original research has been conducted, especially when it appears in a primary source.

As a two-word scientific/technical term, is dominant group a member of the dominant group of two-word scientific/technical terms?

This exploratory investigation into dominant group and its usage has the potential to demonstrate that dominant group

1. when identified is a causative force for change by its nature, requires further investigation, 2. should be no longer used as a scientific/technical term because its meanings are unclear and vague, or 3. identifies an inhibiting or moderating force that works against 'high-risk, high-reward' "research with an inherent high degree of uncertainty and the capability to produce a major impact on important problems in biomedical/behavioral research"[4], or in other scientific/technical fields.

Conception and organization

This exploratory effort uses the template system (the dominant group template is near the bottom of this page [:http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Dominant_group/Funding]) to organize and keep readily available the efforts already begun and those still needed.

Access to resources

Part of the challenge of this type of experimental inquiry is that authors of today or even in the 1800s are likely to use dominant group to describe the past when the term itself was actually not used by an earlier author.

University level access, including its medial research center, (both of which are available local to the principal investigator, PI) to much earlier original documents may be required to confirm the term earlier than 1826, its current date of specific use in English by Kirby regarding the distributions of insects. Local availability for interlibrary loan of needed resources also exists.

As Google scholar, for example, displays older and older manuscripts or books, especially before 1826, the probability increases of finding the term or eliminating its use by specific authors.

Web-based resources (including e-mail) are available to the PI.

Broader impacts

Exploring modern languages, languages on the verge of extinction, and extinct languages for terms that are either relative or exact synonyms (translations) for dominant group advances discovery and raises awareness of meaning and terminology.

For example: "In January 2008, a coalition of over 40 civil society groups endorsed a statement of principles[5] calling for precautionary action related to nanotechnology."[6] "The group has urged action based on eight principles. They are 1) A Precautionary Foundation 2) Mandatory Nano-specific Regulations 3) Health and Safety of the Public and Workers 4) Environmental Protection 5) Transparency 6) Public Participation 7) Inclusion of Broader Impacts and 8) Manufacturer Liability."[6]

"Nanomedicines are just beginning to enter drug regulatory processes, but within a few decades could comprise a dominant group within the class of innovative pharmaceuticals, the current thinking of government safety and cost-effectiveness regulators appearing to be that these products give rise to few if any nano-specific issues.[7]"[6] Bold added.

Advancing discovery and training

"Ethnocide is when a dominant political group attempts to purposely put an end to a people’s traditional way of life. Linguicide (linguistic genocide) is when such a dominant group tries to extinguish the language of a minority group, say by punishing anyone caught speaking it."[8] Bold added, Exploring the meaning and use of dominant group in such context increases understanding of the forces at work characterized by the terms inclusion.

Underrepresented group participation

The proposed activity is ongoing at Wikiversity [:http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page].

"Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities. To learn more about Wikiversity, try a guided tour or start editing now."[8]

Infrastructure enhancement

Information may be made available in various venues:

1. databases or contributions to other databases of all institutions, agencies, and individuals who manage similar databases, 2. contributions to ongoing network analyses, and 3. information sharing and access.[10]

Wikiversity is the premier online research and education database, facility, network and partnership of the WMF. That the proposed activity is ongoing at Wikiversity makes the information generated available through access and sharing.

"Just as an FYI, Wikiversity has been placed among the 'top picks' for this Google+ education list. It has been shared over 2000 times since its original posting.[11]"

The proposed activity would partner NSF with Wikiversity to enhance the infrastructure for research and education, including where possible, facilities, instrumentation, and networks within Wikiversity and between Wikiversity and NSF.

Broad dissemination

Dominant group is an ongoing original research project that is being open-sourced here at Wikiversity both as a learning resource and to yield the broadest possible dissemination.

Benefits to society

"Dominant group(s)", designated vaguely by the term, and the associated ideologies of exclusion, serve as apparent focused power structures that increase existing disparities in wealth and status, while marginalizing or disenfranchising "Others".[10] Bold added.

This proposed activity explores the two-word term "dominant group" to increase awareness of what dominant groups are linguistically as well as socially and scientifically. As the original research effort is ongoing at Wikiversity it benefits all audiences that explore learning through Wikiversity. A successful collaboration between NSF and Wikiversity helps to disseminate the societal benefits of NSF to any local community where some access to the internet and computer terminals in various forms exists such as at pre-schools, elementary and secondary schools, high schools and universities.

Dominant group is a scientific/technical two-word term that occurs at least once in some 280 English Wikipedia entries. These usages may be original research, plagiarism, copyright violations, properly cited uses, or simply mistakes in usage by editors and contributors. Or, dominant group because of its long history may have become a commonly used two-word term that crosses the barrier between common language words that are in a dictionary and the scientific/technical vocabulary of specialists, scholars, and experts. On the general web as sampled by Google, dominant group yields about 513,000 results. Many of these relate right back to the ongoing research at Wikiversity or to the earlier dominant group entries on Wikipedia.

As a potential indicator of copyright violation, dominant group may serve to help improve major web-based resources such as Wikipedia. On Wikipedia dominant group occurs in some 280 entries and as a split term such as dominant ethnic group in some 15,700 entries. Overall the English Wikipedia contains some 4,014,000 entries.

Articles or presentations of the research outside Wikiversity will be prepared openly here at Wikiversity as a teaching and training resource. Publication of such resources in open-access journals or scientific society journals benefits multiple audiences.

Before the benefits of the term and its relative synonyms are assessed, there is a need for some form of control group to serve as comparison. It should be noted that the two-word scientific term control group is a relative synonym of dominant group.

Sincerely,

(User: Marshallsumter at Wikiversity)

References

1. Gary Rosenberg (September-October 2012). "Infrared Dating, In: Letters to the Editor". American Scientist 100 (5): 355. Retrieved on 2012-08-16. 
2. Jack White (September-October 2012). "Mr. White responds, In: Letters to the Editor". American Scientist 100 (5): 355. Retrieved on 2012-08-16. 
3. Youngja Park, Roy J Byrd and Branimir Boguraev (2002). Automatic Glossary Extraction: Beyond Terminology Identification, In: "Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics". Morristown, New Jersey. pp. 772-8.
4. Austin, F.C. (2008). High-Risk High-Reward Research Demonstration Project, presentation given to the NIH Council of Councils. Available at: http://dpcpsi.nih.gov/pdf/CoC-112008-Austin-HRHR.pdf
5. (2008) "Principles for the Oversight of Nanotechnologies and Nanomaterials". International Center for Technology Assessment. 
6. (May 9, 2010) "Regulation of nanotechnology". Wikipedia. San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved on 2012-08-27. 
7. Vines T and Faunce TA Assessing the safety and cost-effectiveness of early nanodrugs Journal of Law and Medicine 2007; 16: 822-845
8. Thomas N. Headland (2003). Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines, In: Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session. 47. Toledo-Cebu: Philippine Tourism. pp. 12. Retrieved 2012-08-08.
9. (April 28, 2012) "Wikiversity:Main Page". Wikipedia. San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved on 2012-06-22. 
10. William Doelle (August 2011). "Proposal Submitted to NSF Archaeology Program by: Center for Desert Archaeology". archaeologysouthwest.org. Retrieved on 2012-01-29. 
11. The Jade Knight (March 20, 2012). "Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/March 2012". Wikiversity: 1. Retrieved on 2012-04-13. --Marshallsumter (talk) 21:23, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Email has been sent. --Marshallsumter (talk) 22:28, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Response received:

"Thank you for your inquiry. Your project on two-word scientific terms, specifically “dominant group,” does not fall within the scope of basic scientific research supported by NSF’s Linguistics Program.

You did not identify a particular research question or hypothesis, but based on the description provided, your ultimate goal seems to be understanding societal organization rather than linguistic structure. I asked the program director for Sociology to review your project summary; she indicated that although the concept of “dominant group” might be useful to understanding stratification, the purpose of your project does not seem to advance stratification research, and the methodology is not one that sociologists would employ.

You might check with the Program Directors for Science, Technology & Society (STS) to see whether your topic would be of interest to them. You can find a description of that program here: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5324 It may be that it is more of a Humanities project, and thus more suitable for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Sincerely,

Joan Maling" --Marshallsumter (talk) 01:16, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Education use only files

Up on Commons right now there is a debate going on about using images such as this one: File:SOHO EIT 304.jpg which is a SOHO image. What I am wondering is if we have a license we apply to images for use at Wikiversity that states words to the effect of "For educational use only." This SOHO image and others are good images for astronomy resources.

My second question relates to OTRS, I am happy to contact via email the originators of images that I may want to use here. Usually I upload directly to commons. For a particular image that a replier states can be used say for educational purposes, do we have our own OTRS volunteers who verify that we can use an image for educational purposes here with license "fill-in-the-blank" or do we only have commons OTRS volunteers to do this? --Marshallsumter (talk) 18:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Physics textbook hacking

I started a thread about text- and class-hacking collabs online, particularly a physics booksprint in a couple of weeks which I hope will help us identify how to do this well. See the discussion on wikibooks. –SJ+> 16:09, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Improving communication between your wiki and "tech people"

Hi. I'm posting this as part of my job for the WMF, where I currently work on technical communications.

As you'll probably agree, communication between Wikipedia contributors and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, for example by writing monthly activity reports, by providing hubs listing current activities, and by maintaining "activity pages" for each significant activity. Furthermore, the yearly engineering goals for the WMF were developed publicly, and the more granular Roadmap is updated weekly.

Now, that's all well and such, but what I'd rather like to discuss is how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment.

Some "big" tech projects sponsored by the WMF are lucky enough to have Oliver Keyes who can spend a lot of time discussing with editors, basically incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and engineering staff. But Oliver can only do so much: he has to focus on a handful of features, and primarily discusses with the English Wikipedia community. We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build new features together. Hiring hundreds of Community Liaisons isn't really a viable option.

There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new software features and deployments) that drive you insane. You probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can users do to get there?

I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I can't do a proper job to improve things without your help. So please help me help make your lives easier, and speak up.

This is intended to be a very open discussion. Unapologetic complaining is fine; suggestions are also welcome. Stock of ponies is limited. guillom (talk) 14:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Size of breaks

Hi. Since a while there is a layout problem with pages like 3-bit Walsh permutation where the binary matrices are not square anymore. Originally they looked like in this screenshot.
In short: The problem is the space between two images seperated with a <br> tag:


The problem exists also on Commons, as seen here. What has changed, and how can I fix it? Lipedia (talk) 10:35, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Do not puzzle over it!

I thank for the help in this question, now I will not commit such error.

I'm not sure what's going on here. There are at least two sources available on the full web that may have helped one way or the other. The first is ATSDR-PHA-HC-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Main. The second is Characterisation of Model Uncertainty for Reliability-Based Design. Anyone may search Google Scholar for possibly relevant papers. Depending on how the algorithm is designed, I seriously doubt any MBA student could cook up such a plagiarism detection tool, but a mathematician or physicist probably could, especially one with programming expertise. Hope this helps. --Marshallsumter (talk) 23:19, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

How to detect plagiarism in university papers

I am a professor at a university in Washington State. My concern is how to detect plagiarism in university papers. I have discovered a clever pattern my MBA students are using to avoid detection of their use of plagiarism (such as from Wikipedia). After cobbling together content (direct and indirect quotations) from various sources, the students use a plagiarism detection tool to identify which parts of their paper need to be modified to avoid detection of lack of any attribution.

I discovered that the student used without attribution a Log Normal Probability density function on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution that has the caption: "Some log-normal density functions with identical location parameter μ but differing scale parameters."

I very much need your help in identifying the unattributed source for the following description (of the above log-normal distribution).

For example: “Figure 6, presented below, illustrates several log-normal distribution shapes as an example of how distributions can vary widely depending on the nature of the process. Looking at the highly skewed example, it is easy to see how an assumption of normality could greatly under-predict defect rates in the direction counter to the skew.”

DrBillPMP Professor bill.warner@comcast.net --DrBillPMP (talk) 18:25, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

We have some information at Plagiarism which includes links to some useful websites. There is some very good advice at http://writing.mit.edu/wcc/resources/teachers/detectplagiarism There is some general information that might be helpful at http://www.plagiarism.org/ It sounds like the students might be using a service like http://www.grammarly.com/ or http://turnitin.com/ --mikeu ^talk 16:38, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

School:Irish studies

I would like some help or feedback on the following: With the colorful circle situation, I located some 60 schools that were not in the Category:Schools and placed them in it, hopefully to assist Wikiversity visitors and potential students to find a school of interest. This appears to have worked and IP visitor 180.93.171.201 found the School:Irish studies. The IP noticed that a discussion existed regarding a merge to the School:Humanities and deleted my category edit. That discussion is four years old with no new additions. I believe it helps the discussion, visitors such as the IP to find the school and others to hopefully contribute to have the school in the schools category. What is the best thing to do? Should I return the Category:Schools for a third time or not? The IP undid my revision of adding the category twice. I'm not here for edit wars! What do you think? --Marshallsumter (talk) 20:15, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

If you have just created content, for Irish Studies as a school, then I see no reason to second guess the categorization anymore. You can notice that I didn't fault African Studies. I lightly removed some poor categorizations. (One such suggested school was only a user's page with lots of transcluded info). 180.93.179.89 05:20, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I did create the content for the School:Irish studies under the 'See also' section. At the times I put the school back into the Category:Schools I was unaware that a discussion of merging had taken place until I read your comment about the Discussion page. It appears to be the norm that schools under such a discussion are placed in Category:Items to be merged and the template in the case of the School:Psychology, merge|Psychology, is put at the top of the page. When these are done, the school is not in the Category:Schools. This is okay I suppose, but I'm wondering if leaving the school in the Category:Schools until the discussion is somehow concluded, is a good thing for promoting discussion. I believe it is.

The Topic:African studies is another interesting example. I usually associate departments denoted as topics differently than schools. Perhaps both a topic page and a school page should exist.

The "One such suggested school" I presume you are referring to is School:Merchant Marine, where you deleted my categorization to Category:Schools. Here, again, listing this school in the category allowed you to find it and comment. I can add some content to a 'See also' section by searching Wikiversity with "merchant marine". There are two pages on Wikiversity that include the term "merchant marine". But, I like you have only limited time. Even if the school was started with only "a user's page with lots of transcluded info", is that not a start on a school that may draw in students, teachers, and contributors? --Marshallsumter (talk) 21:34, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Improvements added to School:Merchant Marine and Category:Schools returned. --Marshallsumter (talk) 21:22, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The improvements you made were a mismatch. I've flagged the only included article for criticism. I recommend that it be delisted as a school if it has no real interest. Any interested editor could start a better school. It's a poor incentive for contributions! The page's existing look feels like vandalism to me. 180.93.171.250 09:56, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

First of all, thank you again for demonstrating that listing schools in the Category:Schools helps potential contributors to find them. Your comments to School:Coaching, School:Coaching sports, School:Merchant Marine, and School:Biomechanics are contributory. NPOV is not required on Wikiversity. This is not Wikipedia. And, your once again removing the Category:Schools from the School:Merchant Marine indicates you are edit warring, not contributing regarding this, but that may be up to a custodian to decide. --Marshallsumter (talk) 16:17, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

The contributions could be better managed under a project to downgrade schools to special schools. Custodians might be necessary to oversee any dramatic changes, such as moving to Special_School. An example is School:Sam916, see Category:Specialty Schools. 180.93.176.47 08:29, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

School:Sam916 has been moved to User:Sam916/School and removed from the category. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:39, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

I agree! Thank you for changing the categories to specialty schools. It's a better fit. --Marshallsumter (talk) 20:30, 10 November 2012 (UTC)