Talk:UC Berkeley School of Information

page content
There has been some discussion already on what should be part of this page.

I think that there is little reason to have a plain list of faculty without any associated information. If at all, the faculty list should be made into a category that can be linked from this page.

Also I would think that the following content should be introduced on the page:

- history, (as mentioned by Joebeone below) - profile of students from each batch. what are the backgrounds, avg, work experience etc - phd research topics - some overview information about the 'awesomeness' of master's final projects. - what jobs do people take up after an ischool degree - faculty names are not very usefull, unless we talk of what are the major research areas people are working on.

- unique/specialized offered at the iSchool. - ischool traditions [ noise should be introduced to the world ]. i think wikipedia does not discourage aneqdotes if they help in elaborating on the subject of an article :)

mohit.ed (talk) 01:46, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

short history
It just changed from SIMS to SI, but what about when it was a library school and then decided not to seek further ALA accredidation. It's that important? And why did that happen anyway?


 * Few of us know that history... I believe some of it is available on the website... feel free to add it. -- Joebeone (Talk) 21:36, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I added this to the Introduction summary, but we should definitely have a History section. mohit.ed (talk) 01:36, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Started Page
I don't have time right now to fill things in... I was cribbing off of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism page. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 18:02, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Frustration on Student Listings
I'm frustrated that the students section is limited to the PhD students only. Masters students make up a huge part of what SIMS is - at least as big a part as the PhD students. Let's not promote the useless academic hierarchy on Wikipedia, especially since we try not to do it in South Hall! -- Judd Antin

Judd, danah added the Phds. Feel free to add a section for Master's students... that's the idea. It's not that we chose to exclude them... rather that a given author has only a little time and interest to contribute. Change it, Man! That's the wiki way! :) -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 20:26, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Judd - there no bad intentions at all. It's more that i was able to go through the PhDs and know who was actually there and who wasn't, know who was alumni (which don't exist). I put (PhD) after everyone figuring that folks who knew the Master's could put that after folks. It was more of what i knew. -- danah boyd

Should we be posting students?
I'm not going to remove this yet, but seriously, is this a good idea? First of all, students are a more transient part of the school. Secondly, it seems like it violates privacy.

Shouldn't this page focus on what it is, and what a "School of Information" is? If people are really interested in the students, and for that matter the faculty, they can get them from the site.


 * I agree. I don't know why a list of students belongs here at all. Also, I've never heard anyone refer to us colloquially as iSchool. But that may just be me... -- Ross


 * I'm going to remove them... not because it violates privacy; everyone is listed on the SIMS web page... but because it's not good style. If you look at the UC Berkeley page, they had to stop listing faculty because it got to large and moved that to another page. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 23:57, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

--I completely disagree with this. Individual students, of course, should feel free to remove themselves if they feel uncomfortable. But students are the lifeblood of SIMS, and I would want a visitor to our Wikipedia page to know that we value our community of students. We are a small school, and so we have the luxury of listing all of the contributors to our world that a larger department or the University as a whole doesn't have. Maybe there is a better way to list students, perhaps by creating columns or by creating a page for students. -- Judd


 * Judd, to keep the page manageable, I would suggest creating a separate page for students much like what has been done on the UC Berkeley for the faculty list. I forgot to mention that some past students were thinking of creating a "past student" container... and that would have made the page much less about the school and much more about the people. Does this sound reasonable? (Oh yeah, to sign something in a talk page... just type four tildes "~" in a row after your comment and the software will fill in your name and time of edit.) -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 16:35, 11 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Let me also add some context that I just posted to the fun@sims list... When I started the page, I put down a bunch of containers (Curriculum, People, etc.). I then filled in second-level heading and put Faculty, Students in there.  Danah filled in the PhD students.  Judd then remarked (see above) that he was frustrated that master's weren't listed. Someone then filled in the masters.  The page was then mostly a list of students.  I agree that students are an important part of SIMS, but if you were looking at an encylopedia page on SIMS, would you want to see a list of students?  Would that (which was mostly a bunch of red links meaning no Wikipedia page yet) be useful to you?  As mentioned above, other pages handle this awkwardness by starting new sub-pages like UC_Berkeley_School_of_Information_(Students).  This is what I suggest we do.  (you can see the revision with the full student list here: [page with student list].


 * I just went ahead and did this. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 17:37, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I must be missing something - when did the web stop being a hypermedium, and move to a single-source collection? What is wrong with linking from here to SIMS at Berkeley? Why maintain two versions of the same info? Similarly, why do the links off the student list not point to the pages linked to by SIMS? I'd rather not have to maintain duplicate sites. Perhaps what wikipedia needs is a means to easily extract content from another site (transclusion would be best). Then I can point an entry at another site and the information is really only located in one place. Some simple markup at SIMS would allow this to work if wikipedia understood this. Yes, a community of editors *could* maintain both sites, but think what other things they could more productively do if they did not have to deal with this... --70.132.6.32 17:54, 11 November 2005 (UTC)


 * A mere listing of students doesn't add any useful information for someone wanting to learn about the school. Furthermore, the SIMS studentbody changes frequently (more frequently than UC Berkeley faculty, certainly) - it will need an overhaul at least once a year, but will probably not be visited much by those who would overhaul it (the students).  I'd rather keep the student listing to the SIMS website, where it is guaranteed to stay updated and is easy to find for those who want it.


 * I feel similarly. I know of two people that feel differently (Judd and someone else on the fun list that I will not name due to privacy reasons).  Those who want a students list can maintain it. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 18:14, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I haven't seen any sensible arguments in favor of having a listing of students. This isn't info that belongs in an encyclopedia, period. Keeping the list up-to-date is a chore. Some people (like me) don't want their names listed, so the list will be incorrect in any case. -- Rybesh 08:11, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Some people clearly feel strongly about this. I am in the minority and will, of course, defer. It's interesting how some comments on this page reflect ongoing debates. Rybesh, above, espouses a clear idea of what encyclopedic content should be on Wikipedia. But there is quite a bit of debate over what that means. It's not just me that would disagree with him - I have a feeling similar debates play out on the discussion pages of thousands of articles. Traditionally it has been beyond the capability of an encyclopedia to publish the names of participants in a community - but if they could, would they? Within reason, of course. As I said above, we have the luxury of being a small enough community that a list of names seems reasonable. Anonymous poster '70.132.6.32' above also brings up the debate about whether to link to information or include it in the page. Again, contested. Linking is important and there's no need to duplicate content without reason, but if we do it to much we're making Wikipedia a static medium, since contributors don't have the ability to edit linked pages, only to choose the links themselves. Reasonable people disagree on these issues... --Judd 19:36, 20 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Those are very good points, Judd. Feel free to add the link back, Ryan is free to not be linked. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 20:27, 21 November 2005 (UTC)


 * It doesn't seem right to me that the most persistent person's content should prevail over an alternate consensus. So I think I'll leave it for now, unless there are others who agree with me (and who are willing to come forward!). Judd 02:15, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguating Marc
Obviously, we need to disambiguate Marc Davis and start an entry for him. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall 18:08, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

If anyone's interested in doing this, here's a Wikipedia page on how to write a disambiguation page: Manual_of_Style_%28disambiguation_pages%29. Note: there are actually at least two professors at UC Berkeley with the name Marc Davis... there is our Marc Davis and then [|an astronomy professor named Marc Davis].

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