Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Francis Schonken (talk | contribs) at 07:39, 2 February 2016 (→Re. "Removing"). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Quick status report from Wright State University/Introduction to Astronomy (Spring 2016)

@Helaine (Wiki Ed):

Re:Misplaced Pages:Wiki Ed/Wright State University/Introduction to Astronomy (Spring 2016)

All is going well. For your information:

1. I have greatly reduced the scope of the course by reducing the number of students to 6 and the number of articles to one. The article is at: Draft:Bell's theorem paradox
2. Helaine told me from the start that Misplaced Pages:Wiki Ed was not a suitable platform for Wikiversity projects, and she was right. I created this analog to your "dashboard" and will try it out next semester.
3. This is not a problem you need to solve, but my "Courses" link at the top of my Misplaced Pages window fails to list Misplaced Pages:Wiki Ed/Wright State University/Introduction to Astronomy (Spring 2016). Also, the one article that we will be writing does not contain the WikiEd template warning Misplaced Pages editors that a bunch of students have "invaded" their territory. None of this needs to be fixed due to the limited scope of my operation on Wiki_Ed. --Guy vandegrift (talk) 13:33, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

@Guy vandegrift: With regards to #3, that's because the Wiki Ed dashboard doesn't use the Education extension. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:09, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Finding topics/pages on Canadian ecology

Hi Ian. Students in my Human Ecology course will be working on creating or improving pages about aspects of ecology or sustainability in Canada. I have several questions:

1. Ideally they'll find their own topics, but they could use some help from myself and the course TA Ruth Sharpe User:RuthVancouver. We've looked at the WikiProject_Canada page but don't see anything about science, much less ecology. Should we look somewhere else? Should we post a request for suggestions on the WikiProject Canada Discussion Board?
2. The Assign Articles page of the course lets us assign each student an article to work on. Can we do this for articles that don't exist yet? The students will work on their articles in their sandboxes, moving their articles into mainspace only when they're ready to be graded.
3. The Assign Articles also lets us assign each student a page to review. Can we assign two pages to each student?
4. One more thing. In the past we told students to put a banner in the sandbox where they were building their page, to indicate that this was a student project. Should they still do this?

Thanks a lot in advance! Rosieredfield (talk) 00:23, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi Rosieredfield

1. One of Misplaced Pages's weakest areas is in the area of 'category intersection'. There's a tool called CatScan2, but it isn't always very responsive (for example, right now it isn't loading) and doesn't have a very user-friendly interface. If you look at the subcategories in Category:Canada, you'll find Category:Environment of Canada; that category and its subcategories have a lot of content, and that might be a fruitful place for your students to start looking. Category:Science and technology in Canada looks less promising, but might have some interesting articles among its subcats. (Oddly, it's a subcategory of Category:Education in Canada, which is a subcategory of Category:Canadian society - which makes it difficult to find.) Category:Geography of Canada (which has Category:Ecoregions of Canada among its subcats) is another good place to look. Normally I would point people towards a WikiProject's Assessment table, but WP:Canada is just too big. I will try again later to find some more specific examples for you, once CatScan is being more cooperative.
2. Yes, you can assign non-existent articles. The Dashboard will find them once they're created. (Remind students about capitalisation rules for Misplaced Pages articles - unless it's a proper noun, only the first word in an article title will be capitalised. Without that the dashboard can't find the articles to tag them.)
3. Yes, you can assign multiple articles - either to work on or to review.
4. The Dashboard handles the banner now. It's pretty cool, the fun things it can do these days. :) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Ian. The middle of your first paragraph has some sort of format problems - the links don't appear in the final view, so the text reads very strangely and uninformatively. Luckily I can see the links now that I'm viewing it in Editing mode - they're just the kind of thing I was looking for. Rosieredfield (talk) 22:32, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I messed up linking to categories - luckily Bearcat saw that and fixed them for me. One more reason to use the 'preview' button when editing (as I need to remind myself to do!) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:11, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

No worries. What happened was that because the categories weren't formatted with a leading colon before the word category, instead of text links to the categories they caused this page to be filed in the categories — so the links were sitting at the bottom of the page instead of within the paragraph above. Another thing you can do, if you want to be really safe about not accidentally doing that, is to use the {{cl}} template to format a category link that's meant to just be linked to, so that you would type {{cl|Canada}} to produce Category:Canada. But as noted, I fixed the links accordingly so that this page wasn't sitting in the content categories. Hope that helps a bit. Bearcat (talk) 15:26, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Re. "Removing"

Please hold your horses, I haven't been "removing" anything from Misplaced Pages:Wiki Ed/University of North Carolina School of the Arts/History of Musical Styles I and II (Fall 2015, Spring 2016), and don't take lightly to these false accusations. --Francis Schonken (talk) 15:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Replied at User_talk:Francis_Schonken#FYI. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:59, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Please explain what use is the "mirror" when it can't be used for communication with the project? --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:30, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

So what are your intentions: a reasonable discussion, or you trying to bully me in every possible way? Please anwer my previous question: what use is the "mirror" when it can't be used for communication with the project? --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:35, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Nah, had tried the talk pages, contacting Dr.renMueller in various ways (in December as now again)... no reaction. So no, the faulty instructions given by the project manager will stay corrected on the project page, and the same for the useful instructions of where the pages his students worked on went to. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:44, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

For one thing, Francis, you removed the actual name of the instructor and the name of the Education project support staff . That is completely unacceptable. Ian has tried to explain to you how those course pages work and why your editing is disruptive and counter-productive there. I did too, last December. The education projects have their own special software for maintaining their project pages. The course instructors tend to view the page via their "dashboard" which won't show your changes. This is what the article list looks like on the dashboard. It doesn't show your changes and any time the page is edited by the instructor or someone from the education project, the changes you make will be automatically removed by the software. Please stop this. If you don't, you are probably going to end up at ANI. Voceditenore (talk) 19:32, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Fixed – sorry about that. --Francis Schonken (talk) 19:56, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

No Francis, you did not "fix it". It's not fixed on the dashboard page, i. e. the master copy, because only course instructors or the education support staff are able to fix it there. If they try to add the information where it belongs, or add any new information to the dashboard, e.g. a new class list for the spring term, it's going to automatically override everything on the "mirror" and you will start edit warring and accusing people of vandalism again. Either you can't wrap your head around this or you are being deliberately disruptive to make a point. Either way, it's unacceptable. MOVE your version of the student list and your commentary to the talk page and LEAVE The MAIN COURSE PAGE ALONE. I personally agree with you that the current software fails to encourage full participation and interaction on Misplaced Pages by the instructors and students and thus has a lot of disadvantages, but this is not the way to go about it. Bring it to Misplaced Pages:Education noticeboard/Incidents, start an RfC, whatever, but please stop this behaviour now. As I said, if you don't, you're going to find yourself at ANI and rightly so. Voceditenore (talk) 07:10, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

I fixed the realname issue. Of course I didn't fix the external application's issue (not in my remit). --Francis Schonken (talk) 07:39, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Castleton University Climate Change in the Media

Hi Ian, My name is Conner, and I am part of the Climate Change class at Castleton University. I have a question about one of the films and its availability. I would like to work on the page for the film Fuel, But it already has some content. My professor thought that this page may be a "stub", but asked me to contact you to see if this was still a good option for our project, and requested that I seek conformation from you. Please let me know if there are any issues with my persuit of this documentary.

Thank you, CjohnsonCU (talk) 19:36, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Replied at User_talk:CjohnsonCU#Fuel. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:07, 1 February 2016 (UTC)