Talk:Erasmus Student Network

ESN official contributions
The page has been added by the regular board member of Erasmus Student Network. Nobody from ESN will make any problem. I'm just mailing to our mailing list to explain what's happening

The Board of Erasmus Student Network agrees that the previous version is available on Wikipedia. Do I need to show something or this thread is enough?


 * Dear anon. Wikipedia would welcome the contrubutions form ESN official pages, but in order to accept your contributions you must make it clear that they are licensed under a license we can use - see Copyrights. You may want to register, sign with your full name and email if you represent an official organisation and reply at Copyright_problems as well. Please understand that we respect your willingness to contribute to our project, but we have to respect copyright laws as well. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 16:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Hi, I am representing the board of ESN and I can confirm we give permission for the text about the Erasmus Student Network on wikipedia. If you'd have any doubts about my declaration, feel free to contact the board of ESN at board@esn.org.
 * Toon Macharis, ESN Network Administrator. 2:00 AM CET, July 14th, 2005

Hello, I have been adding the link to our official song (voted by the general assembly in 2008) some times now. However, a bot continuously deletes the link; even though, we have full copyrights over that video. Thanks for your statement. Matthias Fenner, President ESN InternationalFennemat (talk) 17:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Erasmus Student Network. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101012165133/http://www.esn.org/content/what-esn to http://www.esn.org/content/what-esn

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 06:58, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Request edit on 19 July 2018
Replace

"ESN sections were founded in various European universities and with financial support from the EC a meeting for the official founding of ESN International was organised in Copenhagen, Denmark in October 1990 with 49 participants from almost all member states that were part of the Erasmus programme. ESN International became a legal association. Desiree Majoor from Utrecht, Netherlands[4] became the first president in ESN history."

with

"ESN sections were founded in various European universities. With financial support from the EC, Christian Schoenberg and Mads Stenbæk, both students at the University of Copenhagen, organized and hosted a meeting for the official founding of ESN International in Copenhagen, Denmark in October 1990. The organizers invited 49 representatives from almost all the Erasmus-program member states. ESN International became a legal association and Desiree Majoor from Utrecht, Netherlands[4] became its first president."

Rationale: I just realized that neither I nor my co-founder and co-organizer Mads Stenbæk (https://www.linkedin.com/in/madsstenbk) are recognized anywhere in the materials relating to the founding of the ESN. We spent almost an entire year organizing the event and the first AGM.

Tollundium (talk) 03:08, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Reply 28-JUL-2018
Your edit request proposal contains additional information which this passage in the article did not presently contain. In order to add this new information, please provide references from secondary sources which confirms the added aspects of the claim. For the time being, the non-grammatical passage has been omitted from the article. Regards,  spintendo   11:57, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Fixing the sourcing on this page
Along with my additions, I am currently working hard to add relevant sources to this page, which has been badly neglected on that front. When I am done, I will advocate for the removal of the "unsourced section" tag. I am open to discussions regarding these topics if needed.

--SwissTHX11384EB (talk) 23:37, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

Recent edits
- your edit summary here is quite belittling. Unfortunately, I am not a supercomputer or AI bot filled with all the world's knowledge, so, perhaps next time try providing a more clear WP:ES so that other editors don't have to do all the guesswork. "More in-depth information about the evolution of the borders of ESN" doesn't provide extensive detail into what exactly you are doing, especially considering you are adding unsourced content. Per WP:RS, you should have provided reliable sources with the material you added. Please have a brush up on certain policies and try to proofread your edits to avoid others having to clean up basic capitalization and pipe link errors. Thanks! :) Archives908 (talk) 05:15, 17 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Sorry if the phrasing of the edit message sounded belittling, it was not the intention behind it. Your contributions have been very much appreciated. I wrote this after spending the whole night peeling the fine print of dozens of messy documents apart trying to find the exact information about these rules and I was quite tired. The info about Mediterranean countries was provided higher in the paragraph, but next time I will add this as a comment.
 * As for the sources, I totally agree that there is a lot of unsourced material here, as ESN have never been super good at making public reports of this kind of stuff. I am progressively uncovering more and more sources for these different pieces of information and am trying to balance the sourced and unsourced stuff to hit the sweet spot for this page. I managed to improve the sourcing quite a bit, but there is still a ways to go.
 * --SwissTHX11384EB (talk) 09:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you, I appreciate that. And yes, I have noticed your major contribution to the article resulting in a great overall improvement. I have removed the issues template as a result. Cheers! :) Archives908 (talk) 21:11, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Etiquette reminder for Wikipedians who are also ESN members
Full disclosure: ''I am an outgoing longtime ESN member and frequent editor of this page. I have tried my best during the past year to rescue this page from the decrepit and neglected state it used to be in while respecting Wikipedia editing guidelines. This includes research for proper publicly-available sourcing of unsourced claims, increased neutrality, removal of irrelevant information, addition of relevant information and improving the overall structure of the article.''

Introduction: It takes no genius to understand that this page is mostly edited by ESN members and exchange students. Despite how deeply people who are part of or associated with this association care about it, ESN is not that important all things considered, and this is reflected in the page's "Low‑importance" rating in the Europe WikiProject and its "Mid‑importance" rating in the Education WikiProject. Anyone related to ESN who wishes to edit this page should therefore take a healthy sip of modesty before grabbing their keyboard and keep this in mind at all times.

On to my main point : I find the zeal with which some ESN Wikipedians contribute to the site to be quite problematic. This has reached a point where at least four pages about ESN-related topics have been created that, in my opinion, cannot justify having a dedicated page on this platform:
 * Erasmus Student Network Armenia
 * Erasmus Student Network Yerevan
 * National Erasmus+ Office in Armenia
 * International Erasmus Games

Armenia-related pages: The Armenia and Yerevan pages were all created and mostly edited by a single Wikipedian, whose edit history makes their high interest in Armenian-related topics very obvious. I want to make it crystal-clear right now that such an interest is in no way a bad thing, but it should not trump the etiquette that all of us Wikipedians are supposed to abide by. ESN in itself is already a low-interest topic in the eyes of the general public, and therefore it makes no sense to dedicate entire pages to the ESN Armenia national organisation and the ESN Yerevan local chapter. The existence of these pages amounts to self-promotion (see Self_promotion), which gives a terrible image of ESN as a whole and could make site administrators take punitive steps over time should this trend persist or even expand. No other ESN national organisation has received such a treatment, and rightfully so. Side note: even though the Erasmus+ Office page is not about a part of ESN, it is nevertheless closely related to the topic and visibly created with the same goals as the other two.

Page marked for merging: Furthermore, the ESN Armenia page was marked for merging with the present page (through a discussion I was not part of, let it be known) over a month ago and steps have yet to be taken by interested editors to carry out the merging. This merging must be completed in compliance with this verdict, and I would argue that logic dictates the same needs to happen to the ESN Yerevan and National Erasmus+ Office Armenia pages.

Motivation of some edits: A final point about Armenia-related edits: I have noticed that some edits on this page give a slight hint of political motivation, something that I find quite problematic. One example is the removal of the mention that 2 of the 45 ESN NOs are fully located in the Western part of the continent of Asia (Armenia and Jordan) and classifying these countries as European instead. I understand and respect the desire of Armenians to develop closer ties with European institutions, but misrepresenting geographical facts on a Wikipedia page will accomplish exactly none of that. There is no shame about being from West Asia, and it does not make one inferior to Europeans in any way, shape or form. Current trends indicate that ESN will keep expanding outside the borders of the European continent in the coming years, and the number of non-European NOs will only grow as a result with no good reason to hide it. If anything, this is something we should be proud of.

IEG page: Moving on to the IEG page: it makes no sense in my mind to dedicate a page to an internal sports tournament of an organisation considered of "Low-importance" by Wikipedia. Meanwhile, there is no page for the network's largest endeavours such as EGM, nor should there be. Most of the information on that page is of relevance only to a highly-specific minority of readers and I would like to advocate for the merging of that page with the present one as well, while limiting the content that gets ported over to its highlights and avoiding going into granular details about specific editions of this event.

Conclusion: I would like to conclude by saying that this message is in no way intended as a personal attack towards dedicated Wikipedians and that I respect the love and passion that was put into each of these articles. It is rather a call to order and a reminder that reckless Wikipedia edits by ESN members only contribute to eroding the reputation of the very network they care so deeply about. The page about ESN has a place on Wikipedia, and that privilege should be honoured by abiding to Wikipedia etiquette to the best of our ability at all times.

Everything mentioned here is of course open to civil discussion. Let us please all commit to making this a high-quality page about a high-quality network.

-- SwissTHX11384EB (talk) 14:48, 4 July 2024 (UTC)