Currently, schools are part of departments, however departments can serve better as being part of schools. If that's the case, what should schools be part of?
James Hare wrote:
Currently, schools are part of departments, however departments can serve better as being part of schools. If that's the case, what should schools be part of?
I think the original idea behind schools was to have about five or six different schools that would hold all of the Wikiversity content. The problem was that there wasn't any firm policy set up to deal with letting these get out of hand, and every new contributor to Wikiversity it seemed decided to start their own school.
To keep this organized in even a semi-haphazard way, the "schools" were then grouped into departments just to try and put a sense of order to everything. That is why the situation seems to be reversed.
To really muck things up, when I started moving content over from Wikibooks to Wikiversity, I decided to switch the order of things (based on some IRC discussions about the topic where the other IRC participants seemed to have agreed. But not everything was renamed, so we are sort of half-way between the transition. In some ways I'm deliberately leaving this, so others can put in their $0.02 on the direction we should go, or if we should abandon the whole idea of schools and departments altogether.
BTW, some of the old Wikibooks "Schools" in turn have additional "departments", so there are other levels that need to be either "flatened" or somehow reorganized as well. I think it has been generally agreed upon that we are going to get rid of the "deans" of each school, and come up with some other organizational system.
Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax, stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a community to come up with a name.
I believe what we currently call Departments we should call Schools (so there'd only be like 7-10 of them), and within these schools we'd have Departments in the form of subpages (e.g. School:Engineering and Technology/Audio Engineering). These departments would be responsible for lessons. And there'd be no deans but departmental advisors.
Portals and topic pages would be unrelated to this school scheme -- they'd be their own way of presenting topics.
Also, once we have a consensus on the name, we should have one individual responsible for the transition so there's no mayhem. I'd be more than happy to be the person.
Before we start working on a workable definition, should we put something in the Site Notice about how instead of making schools we should work out a reasonable definition, then link to relevant discussion?
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Currently, schools are part of departments, however departments can serve better as being part of schools. If that's the case, what should schools be part of?
I think the original idea behind schools was to have about five or six different schools that would hold all of the Wikiversity content. The problem was that there wasn't any firm policy set up to deal with letting these get out of hand, and every new contributor to Wikiversity it seemed decided to start their own school.
To keep this organized in even a semi-haphazard way, the "schools" were then grouped into departments just to try and put a sense of order to everything. That is why the situation seems to be reversed.
To really muck things up, when I started moving content over from Wikibooks to Wikiversity, I decided to switch the order of things (based on some IRC discussions about the topic where the other IRC participants seemed to have agreed. But not everything was renamed, so we are sort of half-way between the transition. In some ways I'm deliberately leaving this, so others can put in their $0.02 on the direction we should go, or if we should abandon the whole idea of schools and departments altogether.
BTW, some of the old Wikibooks "Schools" in turn have additional "departments", so there are other levels that need to be either "flatened" or somehow reorganized as well. I think it has been generally agreed upon that we are going to get rid of the "deans" of each school, and come up with some other organizational system.
-- Robert Scott Horning
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
James Hare wrote:
Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax, stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a community to come up with a name.
BTW, most of what I'm trying to do is import content that is already written and found on Wikibooks and Meta. I think this is important so that we can encourage those who have participated in the past with Wikiversity that they can have a place to continue that work. Still, I agree that for the most part we need to try and come to a decision on most of this stuff.
Just a clarification: by "stop making schools" I meant that school making would be -temporarily- ceased until we came to a decision.
I agree with Robert -- let's transwiki everything first, then work on coming to a conclusion. Also, once I get on the page moving rampage after the decision was made, can it be noted in the SiteNotice so that people won't get confused?
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax, stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a community to come up with a name.
BTW, most of what I'm trying to do is import content that is already written and found on Wikibooks and Meta. I think this is important so that we can encourage those who have participated in the past with Wikiversity that they can have a place to continue that work. Still, I agree that for the most part we need to try and come to a decision on most of this stuff.
-- Robert Scott Horning
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
Hey Robert, I noticed you started doing some changes per my suggestion... so should my naming suggestions be taken as naming policy?
On 8/17/06, James Hare messedrocker@gmail.com wrote:
Just a clarification: by "stop making schools" I meant that school making would be -temporarily- ceased until we came to a decision.
I agree with Robert -- let's transwiki everything first, then work on coming to a conclusion. Also, once I get on the page moving rampage after the decision was made, can it be noted in the SiteNotice so that people won't get confused?
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax, stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a community to come up with a name.
BTW, most of what I'm trying to do is import content that is already written and found on Wikibooks and Meta. I think this is important so that we can encourage those who have participated in the past with Wikiversity that they can have a place to continue that work. Still, I agree that for the most part we need to try and come to a decision on most of this stuff.
-- Robert Scott Horning
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
James Hare wrote:
Hey Robert, I noticed you started doing some changes per my suggestion... so should my naming suggestions be taken as naming policy?
On 8/17/06, *James Hare* <messedrocker@gmail.com mailto:messedrocker@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a clarification: by "stop making schools" I meant that school making would be -temporarily- ceased until we came to a decision. I agree with Robert -- let's transwiki everything first, then work on coming to a conclusion. Also, once I get on the page moving rampage after the decision was made, can it be noted in the SiteNotice so that people won't get confused?
I would support such a policy (Schools --> Departments --> Learning experiences/Courses) but it is a pain to do with everything as we are still moving it. I did it to the Psychology dept when I moved it, but that is a special exception. I think I might just stick with the old Schools designiation with redirects until we can get everything straightened out, as moving everything tended to break many links.
Besides, moving pages can be done by non-admins, so if there is a pressing need to accomplish that, we can recruit many more people.
I think we shouldn't focus too much on rearranging everything until we have all the things transwikied. Once we do, we can implement a Page Arrangement Taskforce where people are assigned to move certain pages in according to appropriate naming guidelines.
Until then, we should make browsing very simple.
On 8/18/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Hey Robert, I noticed you started doing some changes per my suggestion... so should my naming suggestions be taken as naming policy?
On 8/17/06, *James Hare* <messedrocker@gmail.com mailto:messedrocker@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a clarification: by "stop making schools" I meant that school making would be -temporarily- ceased until we came to a decision. I agree with Robert -- let's transwiki everything first, then work on coming to a conclusion. Also, once I get on the page moving rampage after the decision was made, can it be noted in the SiteNotice so that people won't get confused?I would support such a policy (Schools --> Departments --> Learning experiences/Courses) but it is a pain to do with everything as we are still moving it. I did it to the Psychology dept when I moved it, but that is a special exception. I think I might just stick with the old Schools designiation with redirects until we can get everything straightened out, as moving everything tended to break many links.
Besides, moving pages can be done by non-admins, so if there is a pressing need to accomplish that, we can recruit many more people.
-- Robert Scott Horning
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org