Editing Encyclopedia:Colloquium/archives/December 2006 (section)

== A Few Comments ==

Okay, yeah. Hi everyone, I gotta say, when I discovered this place, I was in disbelief. Simply because of the potential it has to be a great thing. I'm talking future of mankind stuff here. A venue, almost ultimately accessible where you both learn and teach among your peers.

It's gotten me inspired to the nines, I tell ya.

But enough of that, I've got a few suggestions. First of all, I've noticed there's no Orientation page. My arguement for creating one is that it took me a while to find out quite a few simple rules. I think if you standardize all the information someone needs to get started into one detailed page, people would have an easier time understanding everything.

I want to call this next suggestion a class, but I suppose there are no real classrooms here. But I thought of a project aimed at getting the word out about Wikiversity. Students create media, suggest ways to spread the word, embark on field trips & the like. :P

Anyway, just a few ideas to throw out.--[[User:Exmachina|Exmachina]] 11:23 PST, November 26, 2006

:We do have [[Wikiversity:Welcome, newcomers]] as one page that provides links to information that should help newcomers. I think the [[Wikiversity:Guided tour|Guided tour]] could be improved. Feel free to start an "Orientation page". "getting the word out about Wikiversity" <-- we have [[Wikiversity the Movie]], [[Wikiversity Reports]] and [[Wikiversity:Wikiversity outreach]]. Also, we can use templates such as [[w:Template:Wikiversity]] to link other Wikimedia Foundation projects to Wikiversity. What do you have in mind for "field trips"? --[[User:JWSchmidt|JWSchmidt]] 19:33, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
::I was thinking along the terms of setting up a "Class", so to speak, who can design flyers, think of new, interesting ways to promote/fundraise/etc. for Wikiversity. As for the field trips, I was planning on taking a trip to a local University and possibly doing just that... handing out flyers, promoting Wikiversity. I just thought that it would work better as a co-ordinated effort. --[[User:Exmachina|Ex Machina]] 17:32, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
:::Thanks for the supportive comments, Exmachina! if you could help us in developing our introduction and/or help sections, even simply through giving specific critique, that would be great. As to publicising Wikiversity, this should be an ongoing effort undertaken by anyone with the passion to see this project develop into what it could be - as you seem to have. ;-) It could indeed be a coordinated effort in local geographic regions - akin to what the German Wikimedia community have organised in their [[m:Wikipedia_Academy/Abschlussbericht_2006/En|Wikipedia academy]] ([[commons:Wikipedia_Academy_2006|pics]]). But it can also be a distributed, homegrown, personal effort to reach out to people who you know and who you think might be interested or might benefit from Wikiversity. There's ''plenty'' of work to do. :-) [[User:Cormaggio|Cormaggio]] <sup><small>[[User talk:Cormaggio|talk]]</small></sup> 13:22, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

::::I added a page [[Wikiversity:Orientation]]. I also seeded a similar page, [[:es:Orientation]] at the Spanish language Wikiversity and plan do do the same at [[:de:Orientation]] and [[:fr:Orientation]]. The impetus is to add a way for speakers of different languages to navigate between the different versions of Wikiversity that have established subdomains. All of these might contain links to universal pages such as [[Wikiversity:Welcome, newcomers]] and [[Wikiversity:Browse]]. We could create a REDIRECT to our [[Orientation]] page for the Spanish, French and German translations of the word, thus interlinking all four versions  via a [[Wikiversity:Interlingual Beta Club|common context]]. Is there a better way to do something like this? [[User:CQ|CQ]] 15:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

:On another note, more a question really-- I started work on [[Topic:Physical Fitness]] and [[Topic:Cardiovascular Fitness]], and I would like to import the information on aerobic and anaerobic exercise over from Wikipedia, but I'm at a loss on a method of doing so. Should I just copy & paste, or is there an easier method? If this is covered somewhere, my apologies, I'm still new & getting used to the place. :P --[[User:Exmachina|Ex Machina]] 21:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

::We can currently import pages, including the pages' history, from Wikibooks and Meta - since they were the two projects that contain material which had been explicitly developed for Wikiversity. Copying and pasting is a violation of the GFDL licence (ie the people who have developed that material don't get explicitly credited), so it's not considered a good idea (though we may have to do it in circumstances where importing is not possible, but where the licence permits). In general, however, it's probably unnecessary to import/copy content from Wikipedia - the content there was developed for Wikipedia's purposes, not Wikiversity's. If you want to develop a page that duplicates ''some'' of the content, you can create a new page on Wikiversity - with some of that information, but with a specific learning activity in mind - and then link to Wikipedia (or Wikibooks, or wherever) for further reading. [[User:Cormaggio|Cormaggio]] <sup><small>[[User talk:Cormaggio|talk]]</small></sup> 17:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)