User:McCormack

Nobody can be free if they need anybody else to tell them what "free" means.
The enemies of freedom will happily tell you what freedom is in order to take it away from you.

Administering Wikiversity

Action required

Templates

Development

Reference

Events and news

I am a custodian at Wikiversity, which means that I generally help clean this place up and offer advice to people to need it. As a custodian my particular interests extend to:

maintaining and promoting the ease of use of Wikiversity
- by providing navigation templates
- by participating in the main page learning project
- by being one of the people who looks after the main portal
maintaining and promoting the integrity of Wikiversity
- by vandal fighting and recent changes patrolling
- by contributing to policy formation and discussion

As an editor, I am interested in elearning, which is why I came here in the first place.

I am a rather poor mediawiki hacker, which means that I have my own MediaWiki installations, play around with their programming a lot, and sometimes write or help with extensions to the MediaWiki engine.

In the world of Wikimedian Fauna, I am most probably a WikiDragon. If I annoy you, read about WikiDragons and you may understand why.

Other Wikimedia accounts

Since the introduction of the single unified logon, so far as I know, every single other "McCormack" on other Wikimedia projects is me. I edit sometimes on meta, commons and mediawiki, but not usually elsewhere.

Things done

The purpose of this section is partly so that I do not forget what I have done and can follow up on my activities. One of our biggest problems at Wikiversity is "creating a page and then forgetting about it". I find this list more useful than a watchlist. Overall, if you look at my contributions, you will probably see that I rarely edit in the main namespace and mostly edit in the Wikiversity: and Template: namespaces with occasional outings to the Portal: and Category: namespaces.

wrote the first help page for the quiz extension (with a lot of help from Michael Frey); see Help:Quiz.
contributed a didactic analysis of the use of the quiz extension.
started the quiz learning project.
attempted to write an NPOV introduction to open educational resources.
known to occasionally rampage through the Help, WV and Template namespaces in the name of order and cleanliness, accidentally introducing spaces where they don't belong and screwing up some templates.
initiated a proposal for a pre-tertiary portal.
redesigned the main page (most megalomaniac activity to date); many thanks to User:Eadthem for cleaning up the formatting. The templates in this category Category: main page templates are mostly my creations.
rewrote Wikiversity:Learning projects.
created some rather large navigation templates: Template:About Wikiversity, Template:Using Wikiversity, Template:Administering Wikiversity, Template:Learning innovation, .
standardising the main portal design.
expanded the Wikiversity maintenance hub into a new concept.
wrote an introduction to Wikiversity for teachers.
rewrote the SubPageList Extension for Wikiversity.
How to be a Wikimedia sysop
wrote the first version of Wikiversity:Learning resources.
reconceived Wikiversity:Participants.
started Wikiversity: Vision 2009.
began a redesign of the portal system, including follow-ups on my proposals for pre-tertiary portals: Template:Box portal skeleton 2, Template:Gateways
EMAC, Educational Media Awareness Campaign
Category:design templates
started the Wikiversity Guided Tours programme: Category:Guided tours of Wikiversity; Template:Tour page wrapper (well, the idea is partly taken from Cormaggio's original introduction to Wikiversity).
Initiated Category:Resources by completion status and wrote Help:Resources by completion status.
Conceived and started the project boxes project.
Wikiversity:Wikiversity Day
Reinvigorated Wikiversity:Featured
Help:How to write an educational resource
Help:Resource types, Help:resources by type
Wikiversity:What shall we do with Wikipedia?
Help:101 things to do with your class on Wikiversity
Help:fork
Learning to edit a wiki/Lesson plan A, Learning to edit a wiki
Wikiversity:individualism versus collectivism in resource creation and usage, Wikiversity:communities
Wikiversity:hierarchicalism versus egalitarianism in resource creation and usage

Favourite quotes heard around Wikiversity

"Taking copyright advice from a free-software activist is sort of like learning about evolution from George Bush" (Anon.)
"Wikiversity - the wiki'd way to learn." (Originally contributed by a witty vandal)

Awards

I know some people laugh a little about awards sometimes, but I like these things, if I've earnt them, and I also like to give them out. The nicest awards are the ones which come really unexpectedly after you've done so much work that your mind is quite lost in the work.

		The Original Barnstar
		For boldly making major improvements to the main page. mikeu 16:28, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Miscellaneous

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