User talk:Zellfaze

Welcome! Hello and Welcome to Wikiversity Zellfaze! You can contact us with questions at the colloquium or me personally when you need help. Please remember to sign and date your finished comments when participating in discussions. The signature icon above the edit window makes it simple. All users are expected to abide by our Privacy, Civility, and the Terms of Use policies while at Wikiversity. To get started, you may Take a guided tour and learn to edit. Visit a (kind of) random project. Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education. Find out about research activities on Wikiversity. Explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity. Give feedback about your initial observations Discuss Wikiversity issues or ask questions at the colloquium. Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en. Follow Wikiversity on twitter (http://twitter.com/Wikiversity) and identi.ca (http://identi.ca/group/wikiversity). You do not need to be an educator to edit. You only need to be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage. See you around Wikiversity! --Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 12:39, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Your desire that a resource be kept

You commented on a resource included in Category:Fasten deletion request, that you would like it kept. There is a discussion on Category talk:Fasten deletion request. I've noted your request there. Presumably, if there is an RFD, and if you have email notification of watchlist changes enabled, you'd get an email notification of the deletion discussion tag placement. If you are generally interested in Fasten's work, you could also watchlist that category.

I want to confirm your welcome on Wikiversity.

We are quite careful about deletion here, there is usually a better way. We also usually respect user requests as to pages where they are the only major contributor, particularly because if the creator abandons the resource, it may become a maintenance burden. If you actively watch the page, you reduce that burden. So thanks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:44, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

@Abd, Thank you for welcoming me. I have the page on my watchlist, so at least everytime I stop by here I'll take a look at it. I'm not entirely sure yet what I can contribute to Wikiversity. Most of my editing is done on Wikipedia and Commons, though as of late I have made some forays into the other Wikimedia projects. I've made a small handful of contributions to Wikibooks recently, and I really enjoy working on Wikivoyage. I'll be happy to help out here once I find my niche. Also apparently Template:Ping doesn't exist on this wiki. :( Zellfaze (discuss • contribs) 15:22, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

w:WP:SOFIXIT. :-) Notifications work, so I'm not sure that the template is necessary. I was notified of your edit not only by my watchlist but by your explicit linking to my user name.

Wikiversity is like Wikivoyage in that original research is allowed. My work here over the last few years has be toward making this a safe place to develop educational resources; we handle what might cause deletion elsewhere by organizing content. We have a neutrality policy just like all the WMF wikis, but with proper attribution, content can be self-verifying, if push comes to shove. (Many Wikiversitans identify real-life names and qualifications, which may or may not matter.) I remember, on Wikipedia, spending a day researching reliable sources for an article that was under AfD, finding them and adding them, then seeing the article deleted anyway. After all, all those initial !votes.... which are not supposed to matter, but if you believe that, I've got a great bridge in New York on offer, cheap. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:48, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

@Abd: I went ahead and created the Template:Reply To and all of the associated templates. Is there another scope page beyond What is Wikiversity? and What Wikiversity is not? What sorts of original research are acceptable here? Zellfaze (discuss • contribs) 16:15, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

While there was lots of discussion of that, early on, there being some sort of idea that, OMG, if we allow Original Research, All Hell Will Break Loose, pretty much anything goes, within certain limits that are not difficult to understand and enforce. The following is my opinion, but it's based on what actually happens with deletion requests, for the most part.

• Users are generally free to create whatever they think is an educational resource. It will only rarely be deleted, and we have been finding ways to almost totally avoid deletion.
• If a page is actually an essay (essays are typically original research), one of two things may be done with it.
• A neutral top-level page may be created, if it does not already exist, and the essay moved to a subpage, as an attributed essay. For an example where I created a page with original research, and controversy appeared, so I used this resource as an example of how to handle what would, on Wikipedia, have been highly contentious, because of competition for the single page per topic that Wikipedia structure requires, see Landmark Education.
• If that solution isn't readily obvious, resources may be moved to user space. As a user, let me tell you, if I create an article, I would much rather see it moved to my user space than see it deleted, or even than have to participate in a train wreck of a deletion discussion. And in actual practice, this works. Users remain free to propose a move back to mainspace, perhaps addressing problems with the page. They are free, while the page is in user space, to effectively own it. Thus we keep the door open for consensus to form, instead of deciding to hide content.
• Truly harmful content still gets deleted. The most common successful deletion reason is copyvio. And we often still see this handled with a non-free use or "fair use" rationale.
• So, basically, you can create what you like and if someone doesn't like it, it might get moved, but only naive Wikipedians who show up here are likely to actually propose deletion.
• There is currently a train wreck unfolding on Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion. It will be useful because we will develop policy out of it. If policy were crystal clear, that RFD would never have been filed. I think the defacto community consensus is clear, but obviously some disagree.
• You can see a thread running through my contributions: make this a safe place to develop educational resources, to learn by doing. Users who cooperate in making this safe for others as well almost never have serious problems here.
• When I was a sysop here, I identified a "vandal" as being, actually, a very young user, and proceeded to guide him. I moved his "inappropriate page creations" to his user space. It was disconcerting to him because he was being deleted and blocked all over the WMF wikis, as a "cross-wiki vandal," but he figured out pretty quickly that I was helping him, and he then cooperated. He learned to stop creating mainspace resources, even though, as we'd expect from someone his age, he still occasionally made a mistake, and he occasially created some privacy problems, due to his age, (so I got to practice revision deletion, so what?). He learned to use wikitext. Now, about three years later, he is actually a 'crat and a sysop on a non-WMF wiki now, and has become a very useful Recent Changes Patroller here and elsewhere, and his skills are amazing for his age. Basically, my approach worked, in spite of quite a bit of opposition that I was "coddling a vandal." Damn straight! I have seven children and six grandchildren, and we "coddle" kids until they are ready, we prepare them for independence by first establishing safety. Part of Wikiversity's mission is "learning by doing." We are not only about creating content.

So, basically, you are very free here. Be nice! Don't make massive messes unless you are prepared to clean them up. If a problem appears, slow down and listen and be careful. Get help. The same thing I taught my kids, who were also raised to be able to handle high degrees of freedom without harm. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:07, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

@Abd: So what is the relationship between English and Beta Wikiversity? Zellfaze (discuss • contribs) 17:35, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Historically, they were founded by the same people, out of the same project proposal. However, Beta is the multilingual incubator for specific language wikiversities (which then are created as individual projects when they have enough content and participation). The English Wikiversity is then like the English Wikipedia, with what may be the most content and participation, and Beta is like the Incubator wiki for new language wikipedias. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:20, 18 April 2014 (UTC)