Wikiversity talk:Participants/Archive 1

Please coordinate this page with Portal:Participants. --JWSchmidt 00:48, 20 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

The Coordination Effort has begun. -- Dionysios ^(talk) Date: 2007-07-18 (July 18, 2007) Time: 1420 UTC

This page seems somewhat… a failure. Seeing as only two people have signed up, and they're not even the most active people here on Wikiversity. AfD? The Jade Knight 01:30, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

REASON -- Defunct. Lists a total of 6 participants. At this point, the list would be virtually useless, anyway—participant lists for the various schools/topics/projects are better. The Jade Knight 06:43, 14 July 2007 (UTC)Reply

• Support. This page makes WV look like a failed frat party. McCormack 08:43, 18 July 2007 (UTC)Reply
• Agree that it is not a good reflection of (or on) Wikiversity - there is also Portal:Participants which is an old list of people interested in Wikiversity before Wikiversity was set up - could perhaps this latter be made more useful by acting as a pathway towards people interested in specific areas (like the various "streams")? Cormaggio ^talk 09:59, 18 July 2007 (UTC)Reply
• I agree; in fact I think, both pages should be deleted - they serve little purpose and most of those listed are red links anyways. Countrymike 08:11, 18 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose. This is a legitimate WV Page. Some time ago JWSchmidt requested that this Page be Coordinated with the Portal:Participants. Upon learning of the Deletion Request, this Participant undertook the the initial stage of the Coordination Effort. It could be that if others will join in this Effort, the establishment of a user-friendly guide to WV Participants will result. (Presently the Portal:Participants seems only historical and the Page has yet to achieve much.) With cultivation we may expect a harvest. (s) Dionysios ^(talk), Date: 2007-07-18 (July 18, 2007) Time: 1432 UTC
• ARGUMENTS - What seems to be suggested is that the "concept" of a Participants page designed towards helping Participants figure out where to go may be worthwhile, but the current page does not do that, and its existance may give people the impression McCormack is concerned about. ATM, it serves no useful purpose whatsoever (the same goes for Portal:Participants). The Jade Knight 21:28, 18 July 2007 (UTC)Reply

• The reason the page has never developed is because it is not linked from the main page and wv and school pages keep getting shuffled. I agree as it is it should either be deleted or a participant index linked to from the main and the school pages should be developed. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Special:Listusers is useless because it is saturated with hundreds of unused test accounts. Interesting. The participant index at Wikipedia has been removed from the front page. I wonder it it got unwieldy or if someone decided it was "unencyclopedic". If each school/portal had a participant subpage then these pages could be linked from a master participant file linked into from the front page. Mirwin 22:14, 24 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

• Support - The very idea is umanagable with over 16,000 users. [1] Could be replaced by something like a dynamic list that only shows editors who have (for example) edited within the past X weeks or months, since that is the only way it will remain up to date. Not a single edit since 09:18, 18 July 2007 to address specific concerns above, nor any concrete suggestions on how to remedy the flawed original concept of the page. (This debate is giving me flashbacks to the motto/slogan contest, and the round/square corners debate. Do we really need to beat a dead horse for six months to get anything done around here? Delete it now, or improve it to the point where the tag can be removed, if that can even be done.) --mikeu 17:31, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
• Comments. My comments also apply to #Portal:Participants, below. A key issue for Wikiversity is building community. One approach to community building that is tried by some wiki participants is the creation of participant lists. I think participant lists are not very effective, but I do think we need to be open to letting people experiment and as a community we need to find ways to learn from our experiments. Sometimes it is constructive to have a record of failed experiments. If you delete everything that does not seem to work then you are in effect inviting new visitors to just try re-creating the deleted content without the benefit of learning from past history. In general, I think Wikiversity should help participants learn and understand how wiki communities grow and what works and does not work during efforts to build a community. Deleting pages removes an opportunity for learning. Deletion is for vandalism, copyright violations and pages that have no value to the community. I think we can, as a community, learn from these pages. Ya, the pages are a mess right now, but the correct response to a page in need of improvement is to edit the page and improve it. If you have no interest in participant lists, just move along and find something else to work on. Its mainly up to people who have an interest in participant lists to explore their ideas for how to improve these pages. --JWSchmidt 18:09, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

• Comments - I also see the possibility of participant lists being potentially usefull, for instance at School or Topic pages, although we seem to lack the critical mass of participants, or long term interest from people who sign up for them, to work effectively to build community. But, yes I think the list of all Wikiversity editors is a failed experiment. If, as you suggest, we should keep the material for others to learn from, than see my suggestion at #Portal:Participants to rename that page and place a Template:Historical on it. Also, see my suggestion to use Dynamic page lists to only show recently active editors. I was specifically directed to drop in here and participate in a deletion debate. I would have just "moved along" if I had not seen the template tag requesting that I "Please share your thoughts on the matter..." If "Deletion is for vandalism, copyright violations and pages that have no value to the community." than why do we even have a WV:RFD page? IMHO, it is a healthy exercise to critique and gather opinions about how specific pages help or maybe even hinder the wikiversity mission. In any case, no incremental improvements have been made to these two pages, and no major changes can be attempted until a custodian closes this debate. The comments so far look like a prefernce for delete, and those who would like to salvage the page have not done so. With the pages in limbo for half a year I felt that a push to resolve it was appropriate. --mikeu 19:22, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

I tend to scatter "I think" and "my view is" throughout my comments, but, ya, eventually I get tired of starting every sentence with such a qualifier. When I gave my view that page deletion requests should be limited to, "vandalism, copyright violations and pages that have no value to the community," I was not trying to suggest that other people cannot have a different opinion about the role of page deletion at Wikiversity. Wikipedia, in particular, has evolved a culture of reflexive widespread page deletion and I think some editors come to Wikiversity from Wikipedia and do not ask themselves if Wikiversity can find other approaches to problem pages besides deletion. "a push to resolve it was appropriate" <-- what if we do not delete these pages now but it takes an additional five years before the Wikiversity community finds an effective way to make use of an active participants list? What if deleting these pages now changes the landscape and makes it so that every year someone else comes along and creates a new participants page, we discuss its deletion, and due to this silly dance of creation/deletion it takes ten years before someone can establish a useful participants page? I am not sure that using some warning banner like -FAILED EXPERIMENT, HISTORICAL INTEREST ONLY- is constructive. I think it would be constructive to edit the pages and try to say something about the challenges of growing learning communities...maybe make some links to other pages at Wikiversity that are related to this issue. "healthy exercise to critique and gather opinions about how specific pages help or maybe even hinder the Wikiversity mission" <-- maybe now is the time to make a "request for comments" or "collaboration of the month" page where under-developed pages could be listed in an attempt to get suggestions for how to improve the pages. --JWSchmidt 19:51, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps a request to "register" handle at aggregate Wikiversity participation list could be placed on Welcome template. Kind of a handshake to see how many serious participants arriving have been welcome? Mirwin 20:03, 26 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Now that we have a new Portal:Participants this page is not only obsolete, but redundant. Does anyone still have an objection to deletion, or is there anything worth savings from this page? --mikeu ^talk 12:47, 10 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

I agree that it is redundant. However, yours and John's comments above have made me think (and pardon my long-windedness). Being a researcher, I am someone who appreciates having a record of activity in a wiki (archives of talk pages, etc). But deleting pages removes records (except to custodians) - we are no longer able to see that something has withered - it is gone. And this is problematic if we want to keep a record of 'failed' experiments (just for example) - to see its process of development, and analyse why it became inactive, or 'failed'. But: is this to keep us from deleting anything that might be interesting to future researchers, or developers of similar initatives? (And how are we to know what people would be interested in?)

So, there seem to be three options (all of which have problems):

• Leave every such resource in place and try to improve it. (As well as adding useful content, "improving" could involve redirecting to something more useful - this would preserve the page's history.) Problems with this could include that people will not necessarily know how to improve something if its stated intent is not sufficiently clear.
• Something akin to the '"historical"-labelling' and 'archival' methods used, for example, on Meta (as mentioned above). I would propose that the template used need not describe something as a "Failed experiment" or even "of historical interest only" - instead it could simply say "inactive". Perhaps this would be a two-stage process, involving flagging as inactive (which could/should itself invite interest and activity), and then moving the page to a subpage of Wikiversity:Archive. Problems with this could include that people might not be motivated to resurrect something once it is archived.
• Write up an account of how/why something developed - why it was started, what happened, and why it became inactive/didn't work as planned/failed. When enough detail about the page is preserved for the record, the page could be deleted (though what "enough" is is debatable). This would address the needs of the interested-but-casual observer (though a researcher could ask for it to be reinstated in order to carry out their own research), and of a future participant figuring out what to do in a similar context. It could be written up somewhere like Wikiversity:Failed experiments (I'd prefer a better name, but can't think of anything right now). Problems with this could include that it might require quite a bit of work to write up.

These options would not be mutually exclusive - something could be archived and written up. In this particular case, I propose that we redirect it for the moment to Portal:Participants - or perhaps leave it for now, and figure out what to do with that portal. (I wonder what this portal would do that we should not do with the Community Portal - which badly needs a revamp/rethink, IMO.) I also think that the discussion above should be continued, or utilised in some way, at Building successful learning communities on Wikiversity - and, similarly, that the processes I outline above would feed into projects explicitly focused on documenting and learning from our experience. Cormaggio ^talk 19:24, 14 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Well put. Merge - if there are similar pages with quite similar intents and uses - merge them then perhaps. not delete though --Remi 20:13, 14 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

This Page would grow if Participants would add their names to it.

(s) Dionysios ^(talk), a Participant in the Wikiversity School of Advanced General Studies, Date: 2007-07-18 (July 18, 2007) Time: 1354 UTC

But it would be perfectly pointless. Schools, Departments, even Projects all have their own participant pages, where people with similar interests can find other people on a smaller scale that they can work with functionally. What purpose does this page serve? To catalog everyone who happens to run into this page and add their names? It is no reflection of activity at all. The Jade Knight 21:38, 18 July 2007 (UTC)Reply