Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Open/Archive 3

Activities for Open Access Week
can be collected at WikiProject Open Access/Open Access Week. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:11, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Happy Open Access Week -- announcing the Collaboration of the Week!
All: This week (starting 19 October 2013) is Open Access Week, a time to explore and promote the benefits of open access publishing. So, happy Open Access Week! In its honor, WikiProject Open is launching its Collaboration of the Week program, in which we will focus on improving two Wikipedia articles every week. This week, we have chosen Open Access Week and Creative Commons license. Please join us in improving these articles. And let us know with a comment here that you are working on them! -Pete (talk) 17:30, 21 October 2013 (UTC)


 * If you're interested in OA Week activities outside of Wikipedia, please also check out the WikiProject Open Access/Open Access Week coordination page! -Pete (talk) 17:34, 21 October 2013 (UTC)


 * There are a number of editathons focused on opening up archival content in the Boston area for Open Access Week. Protonk (talk) 17:57, 21 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I added a sentence with a citation to a scholarly journal in the CC license article. Good start!  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   18:37, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Collaboration of the week
I've chosen two new collaborations of the week: Open access mandate and Free culture movement. The open access mandate article has already had a lot of work done this week! - Lawsonstu (talk) 11:52, 25 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, the open access mandate article has had a lot of activity this week! In order to keep the momentum, I suggest that each Sunday we change the two COTW articles. This means choosing two topics, adding the template to their talk pages, and swapping the template on the previous weeks' articles to  . I'm happy to do this, but if anyone else wants to that would be great too! - Lawsonstu (talk) 11:35, 31 December 2013 (UTC)


 * This week's articles for collaboration: Open educational resources and MOOC. - Lawsonstu (talk) 22:20, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Note the Talk:Massive open online course page has had a lot of discussion, and some useful links are posted to it. I'll try and chip in this week! Sjgknight (talk) 22:35, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Open access
As the Open Access Community Liaison for Wikimania 2014, I'm very interested in this proposed project. It will interesting to see what the consensus is as to whether Wikiproject Open Access should be merged into this larger project, or stay as a separate one. I'm willing to be convinced either way! Lawsonstu (talk) 21:26, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

A few comments on some of the points mentioned:
 * "lots of interest for WikiProject Open access; not much active engagement" - This is true. There seem to be a lot of people who support the idea but very few making regular contributions.
 * "no need to fork communities; people interested in one aspect of "open" are likely to support others" - Yes, agree with the second clause, so it does make sense not to fork, although that doesn't mean forking is necessarily wrong. I'm a librarian and tend to see open access from that perspective, as a fairly narrowly defined thing. But the overlap with other open movements is very strong and perhaps should be emphasised. To do so would probably help drive engagement. Lawsonstu (talk) 21:41, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

More comments:

"Open Access track at Wikimania 2014: how to engage? (see: Outreach/Open Access Advocates ) - one plan - get open access article in English to GA before spring 2014" - This is high priority task for us.

"'signaling open access' project (see: WP:WikiProject Open Access/Signalling OA-ness)" - I think this project has the potential to really raise the profile of open access in Wikipedia significantly, so would be a good thing to focus on.

"partnership with Open Society Foundation - possible sponsor of Wikimania OA track" "partnership with Open Knowledge Foundation - managing Wikimania OA track" - Interesting ideas, we'd definitely benefit from further dialogue with both these organisations. Lawsonstu (talk) 21:48, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I, too, would love to see "open" articles, projects and resources housed under a single umbrella (WikiProject Open). I am not sure if I can make the initial call tomorrow (I can try!), but please let me know how I can help to build this project once some decisions have been made. I have experience establishing and coordinating WikiProjects, and I can help tag articles as well once the project is constructed. -- Another Believer ( Talk ) 19:36, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I think an umbrella project for things open makes sense, and WikiProject Open would be a good name to start with. As for "merging" WikiProject Open Access "into" that new umbrella project, I do not see the need, given that other WikiProjects often happily co-exist despite an obvious thematic hierarchy (example). I do not see much harm either - for things like, say, Open Access Week, external partners might prefer to work with WikiProject Open Access over WikiProject Open, but I think this is rather hypothetical. For instance, the Open Knowledge Foundation has successfully operated within all major areas of Open Knowledge without having to resort to changing its name on every instance. What they do have, though, is Workgroups dedicated to the specific sub-topics. In WikiProject parlance, these could be structured as a hierarchy of WikiProjects, or as a simple layer of Taskforces.
 * Currently, there are more tools available that work on the level of WikiProjects than on that of Taskforces, and so I would think that WikiProject Open Access should continue but that articles tagged as belonging to it should be restricted to the area of Open Access, leaving the rest of the currently tagged set to other WikiProjects (e.g. OER), or to WikiProject Open if no specific WikiProject exists. Perhaps this could be simply done with a parameter in the tagging template. This way, it will also be easy later on to start new WikiProjects (e.g. Open Data).
 * The question, then, is how to integrate activities across the subfields. This smells templates. For instance, I can well imagine all project pages of WikiProject Open Access to be marked as belonging to WikiProject Open, just like this page from our OAI8 talk belongs to the "Publishing to & from WP" tab (this association could be conveyed more strongly if we do not stick to one colour).
 * Another issue would be things like article alerts. They are currently set up for WikiProject Open Access and via the newsfeed embedded in the project's landing page. But the recent discussion about open-access journal vs open access journal did not show up there because none of the relevant templates had been used that would have triggered an article alert. So some coherence would be required here. Given that, I think having them set up for WP:Open (and not the sub-topics) would be best.
 * The biggest issue from my perspective, however, is not how to bring together the Open activities within one wiki, but to coordinate things across wikis (e.g. with Commons and Wikisource and across languages). For this, a User group would seem like the natural approach, and I do not see a benefit in splitting this one up by subtopic. The upcoming Wikimania could serve as a catalyst to get this one going now.
 * -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 00:18, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I think I have a good understanding of how the WikiProject/Task Force infrastructure works. It is a little disheartening because there are problems with it, like no cross-project support and also signalling issues with problems in task forces not signalling the main project. I would like to draft with someone else a call for reform of the WikiProject system but I think the WMF has some plan in one of the new communication systems; I am not sure. The current system is really a pain and it was never even intended for its current use; it was supposed to be a cataloging system for putting all of Wikipedia on dvd so some of the things I want the most, like article traffic reports, are difficult to get. I am not sure how much time I want to spend developing something without checking in with software people asking what they have in mind for the future.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   00:50, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

I've been following the discussion above with great interest, not wanting to step in too early. However, I want to say it seems entirely compatible with what I've had in mind; and, since similar thoughts were raised in our planning call last week, I think we've come up with a very light-touch, incremental approach that will keep everybody happy and, maybe most importantly, create an easy-to-comprehend structure for people new to any of our projects.

I have just posted my summary of that plan on the new WikiProject Open planning page, under the heading #First planning call. Please take a look, and if you like what you see, feel free to start taking action (for instance, creating a prominent link to WikiProject Open on the WikiProject Open Access page) at whatever time it seems appropriate. -Pete (talk) 23:53, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Picture bar merger from WikiProject Open Access...
I copied the picture bar and news feed from WikiProject Open Access to here. The Open Access File of the Day has been happening daily since 2011 and the news feed is at least a year old itself. I think that the value of the OAFD is that it demonstrates how OA content is the base from which all other open movements develop - for example, the files became educational resources when they were incorporated into various Wikipedia articles. These two projects have historical precedent of remaining active and alive and at the least are better than nothing. Disadvantages of these feeds are that the media feed emphasizes science and the news feed is only OA, but these could have other perspectives providing content into the existing queue.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   02:51, 15 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks Lane, I'm delighted! Both by the addition, and by your careful explanation of the issues involved. I think this content is a welcome addition to WikiProject Open, and I love the new logo. I do think the introductory text (the paragraph currently above the header "Organization") should be at the top though, or something similar; I appreciate the simple 2-part intro you included, but I don't think it captures enough of what we're trying to do. I'll wait for comments, and perhaps we can discuss on the upcoming webinar, before making any further changes, though. -Pete (talk) 01:15, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Navboxes
I've moved the two 'open' navboxes over from WikiProject Open Access. The second one is not being used, would it be better to merge the two? I thought this might be useful to help define the areas WikiProject Open covers. - Lawsonstu (talk) 21:02, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks Stu! I look forward to discussing what navigation boxes would be useful. I think these are both worthy navboxes, but I agree that "openness" is a larger domain than "open access," and it may be worthwhile to have multiple navboxes to fully cover the topic. The WP:COMMOER content page may be worth a look, as we tried to collect a lot of relevant articles there. -Pete (talk) 01:22, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Just happened on a page that had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Open_navbox and I wanted to say - really good and useful! Suspected that you were behind it... EdSaperia (talk) 20:27, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Presentation of issues and project participants
Here is a matrix of videos in which 8 people have answered 8 questions on OER. I think it would be nice to do something similar for WP:OPEN. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 20:23, 17 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I like this idea, and thanks for the interesting link. (There's a similar one here, produced by the OER Research Hub. If you watch #4, you'll see a couple familiar faces from Communicate OER…)


 * It seems like this would be a pretty easy thing to put together: decide on a few questions, set a deadline, and invite people to upload their answers. Let's put something together! -Pete (talk) 15:50, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Redefining impact
This year's | Open Access Week theme is redefining impact. I think it would be useful if there were a Wikipedia article that better covered this issue, but I'm not sure where to focus energies to address it. I deliberately left the disambiguation link to show how someone new to the idea of what we mean by impact in an open access sense might have trouble finding what we're talking about. There is an article about impact factor and one on impact evaluation, but they're quite technical and not that friendly for people who might be seeking to understand these issues and as importantly, why they're noteworthy. In researching this within Wikipedia, I just added impact evaluation to the impact disambiguation article because it wasn't there. I think the concepts of impact factor and impact evaluation and open access are related in ways that Wikipedia doesn't reflect. I'm keen to hear others thoughts on how this might be best addressed. Alixos (talk) 08:19, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Alixos, thank you for this observation. Sounds very worthy, but it's not my area of expertise, so I will keep an eye on any ideas that pop up here, and try to support the effort as best I can! -Pete (talk) 17:26, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Aha, I just found this relevant article while searching on Open Access Week. Should be a useful reference for the work you describe! -Pete (talk) 17:45, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Best way to keep informed?
Hi all, for those of us who have missed the phone calls, what is the best way to check on outcomes of the meetings at this point? There is a lot about the first call on the planning page - is there a link to an archive of the 2nd/3rd call or to an etherpad of notes? Might be useful to feature these prominently! Really psyched to see this moving forward and I'm keen to start identifying CommOER-nominated articles under the blanket of WP:Open sooner than later. -Sara FB (talk) 14:55, 21 October 2013 (UTC) (Project Manager for CommOER)


 * Thanks for bringing this up. Ideally, watching this page and the "planning" tab should keep you up to date, but I have been slow to update them. (Others are welcome to do so as well, of course!) For the moment, I think the important outcomes to date are:
 * My screencast intro to WikiProject Open (20 minutes)
 * Starting the Collaboration of the Week program (see below)
 * Increasingly strong consensus around the name ("WikiProject Open") and the idea of combining the talk pages of WikiProject Open Access and others
 * General good vibes :)
 * -Pete (talk) 17:08, 21 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Awesome! Keep us all looped! Got to talk about WP:Open last in London week with EdSaperia, organizer for Wikimania 2014 (focus on education, very relevant...). Also with Sjgknight about articles on open educational resources, who edits them (he does), and why. Love the English-speaking world synergies. - Sara FB (talk) 23:30, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Category:WikiProject Open
If project organizers are content with the project title "WikiProject Open", should we create Category:WikiProject Open? -- Another Believer ( Talk ) 03:58, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I suppose that it would not hurt but as of yet we do not have full consensus on the title "WikiProject Open". No one disagrees but there are two more online community meetups to be held, and this is an unorthodox merger among some groups with a lot of stakeholders. I vote to wait 1-2 weeks more to see if a dissenting voice steps forward.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   19:49, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * No problem. I know things are still being worked out. Happy to help when we are ready. -- Another Believer ( Talk ) 19:53, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Another Believer, thanks for the suggestion. I agree with what you've come to -- I think we have strong, but not sufficiently strong, consensus around the name at the present moment. -Pete (talk) 01:17, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Is it time to move forward on this? I've still not heard any dissenting voices. If we do this, I'll help go through Category:WikiProject Open Access articles, and move the non-OA ones to Category:WikiProject Open articles. - Lawsonstu (talk) 08:31, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Would we need to make a Template:WikiProject Open, and replace the Template:WikiProject Open Access on the talk pages of affected articles? - Lawsonstu (talk) 18:56, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Since my favourite Wikipedia rule is 'be bold', I've gone ahead and created Template:WikiProject Open and all of the associated category pages. Could someone with more experience in these matters please have a look and make sure I've done it correctly? I'll wait till I've had confirmation of this before I add any the template to any articles. - Lawsonstu (talk) 13:40, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Category:WikiProject Open has now been created. Again, let me know if anyone thinks I'm moving too fast or doing something wrong! - Lawsonstu (talk) 13:22, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

More on diagram/matrix idea of OER topics
In lab last week, a couple classmates expressed interest in the idea of a diagram or matrix to illustrate how articles about OER -- e.g., open education, open learning, Open Educational Practices, open educational resources policy -- hook into the main OER article. For folks just getting their feet wet in all these "open" terms, like myself, some kind of navigable overview might be helpful. With that in mind, I stumbled on another approach to mapping out a broad field: for the WikiProject on Globalization, there's not only the WikiProject page listing of articles, but also an article called Outline of globalization that textually maps out the terrain of existing globalization articles. And from the Portal:Globalization page there's an introduction that links to the main article on globalization and tabs to get to the WikiProject page and outline of globalization article. I'm not sure where to go from here, so any and all comments are welcome! --Litjade (talk) 18:42, 7 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Excellent find, Jade!
 * For a little historical context: It seems to me that a few years back, there was some semi-coordinated effort to develop "Outline" articles like that. The first one I saw was Outline of Oregon, which was almost entirely driven by people with no involvement with WikiProject Oregon. It looks like the name of this effort is WikiProject Outlines.
 * I hadn't really thought about doing one of these for OER (or openness, or open content, or however you'd define the "topic") but it sounds like a really good idea! I think this would help a good deal in defining the scope of a future "WikiProject Open," and helping us develop a shared vision of what needs to be done.
 * If you're willing to take a first stab at developing such an outline -- even a very basic rough draft -- I'd be happy to jump in and work on it with you, and encourage others to do so, as well! Perhaps outline of open education, outline of openness in education, or outline of open content? (Let's not get too hung up on the title, because it can always be changed if needed!) -Pete (talk) 01:45, 10 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Another possible direction we could go is to create a navigation box that could be included in all articles relating to OER. Here's an example of a navbox I created: Template:Columbia River We don't really have to decide now, because creating an "outline" article might be a good step toward building a navbox. But, something to keep in mind as we pursue this! -Pete (talk) 02:02, 10 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Note -- a rather exciting development, I think! During our Week 6 class, we started outline of open education as a group. As we move forward, let's move this discussion to that outline's talk page: Talk:Outline of open education -Pete (talk) 16:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Excerpts from Week 6 class discussion are now on the outline article's talk page. --Litjade (talk) 11:10, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Tried, but couldn't make a sufficiently good case
My WIKISOO project, an article about Bret Victor, who is helping define the future of user interaction, was declined twice. I guess Victor will have to become more famous to appear in the rear view mirror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Bret_Victor_(2) Jg1141 (talk) 07:18, 15 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Hey there fellow classmate! From taking a look at the decline page, I wonder if a slightly different approach might help build the case for a stand-alone article on the subject -- for example, adding relevant information (along with third-party citations) about Victor's innovations in the information design and/or data visualization articles. --Litjade (talk) 13:25, 15 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Jg1141, I agree with Jade -- and sorry for not replying sooner! I am surprised that neither of the reviewers noted the extensive news coverage of Mr. Victor. I hope you continue to work on this; I'm happy to help if so. -Pete (talk) 15:48, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Work on Category:WikiProject Open
I've created Category:WikiProject Open, and in order to populate the articles listed in Category:WikiProject Open articles I have created Template:WikiProject Open and been adding it to the talk pages of appropriate articles.

The first thing I've done is to go through every article in Category:WikiProject Open Access articles and decide whether I thought they belonged in that category, or within the higher-level Category:WikiProject Open. So about 50 articles (to do with open source software, digital activism, open education etc.) have been moved from Category:WikiProject Open Access into Category:WikiProject Open.

The next thing to do is flag up every article which has the tag Template:WikiProject Open Access, and add them to WikiProject Open as well, so they are in both categories. Is there a way to automate that or does it have to be done manually? - Lawsonstu (talk) 09:21, 13 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I have now started adding every article which has the tag Template:WikiProject Open Access to WikiProject Open as well. So far I've done articles beginning with the letters A-P (except for individual open access journals). Again, if anyone thinks there's a better approach, let me know. User:Daniel Mietchen mentioned above that 'perhaps this could be simply done with a parameter in the tagging template. This way, it will also be easy later on to start new WikiProjects (e.g. Open Data).' That would be great, if someone knows how to do it? Otherwise I'll carry on with what I'm doing.


 * This tagging also has the benefit that anyone watching any of these pages may be made aware of WikiProject Open. - Lawsonstu (talk) 13:13, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Update: articles in the category WikiProject Open Access are now also in the category WikiProject Open. I have also added some other articles, including ones related to open data, open science, free culture, and digital rights. WikiProject Open now has a lot of content (320 articles) but this is skewed heavily towards open access topics. It would be good to add the template to more open education articles too. - Lawsonstu (talk) 19:46, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion about reliable sources in medicine
In WP:WikiProject Medicine there are regular discussions about all kinds of sourcing issues for health articles. Sometimes it happens that someone sources their contributions to a Wikipedia article with an academic journal which is challenged as being of dubious quality. There is a policy on sourcing for health articles at WP:MEDRS, and this policy has strong backing of the community of health editors. Right now there is a discussion about adding advice to that policy about recognizing the quality of various academic journals. Since the policy contains language about open access journals, I thought that people here may wish to give input on this.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   20:06, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Talk pages of WikiProject Open and Communicate OER
Was the idea for the talk pages of WikiProject Open and Communicate OER to set up re-directs so that they default to here, or just encourage people to discuss things here instead? - Lawsonstu (talk) 10:41, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm... I would be in favor of all conversation happening here, and that the other pages be made into redirects. Right now none of these pages have much activity. If this is done, I think that all the archives should be moved here. I am not ready to do this at this time; I would like to think about it.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   20:06, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I set up User:HBC Archive Indexerbot to maintain an archive of this page. It takes some time to activate; when it does the archive of the talk page formerly at WP:OPENACCESS will be here. As it is just one archive and not a big merge, I think that it would be best to not set up a complicated record of the differences between discussions at WP:OPEN versus WP:OPENACCESS. After I set this up for the open access archive I will probably do the same for the open educational resources page, so that all those past discussions seem like a continuous record with WikiProject Open and all future open discussions happen here. I do not know how this bot works so let's wait a few days to see what it does, and if it does not manage things then I will do something different.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   13:14, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Now that the talk pages for both WikiProject Open Access and Communicate OER have been archived, I have added those archives to the info at the top of this talk page and made sure both original talk pages now redirect to here. Thanks User:Bluerasberry for setting that up!


 * From now on, all discussions for these projects/topics can happen here, in one place. - Lawsonstu (talk) 11:51, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay, yes, that looks good and this is best.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   17:40, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Should Wikipedia host video in non-free formats?
There is an RfC on Commons about allowing Wikimedia projects to host content in non-free formats. Any comments that anyone has would be welcome at Commons:Commons:Requests for comment/MP4 Video.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   15:34, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to help craft a proposal
Surveillance awareness day is a proposal for the English Wikipedia to take special steps to promote awareness of global surveillance on February 11, 2014. That date is chosen to coincide with similar actions being taken by organizations such as Mozilla, Reddit, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Feedback from members of this Wikiproject would be greatly appreciated. Please come join us as we brainstorm, polish, and present this proposal to the Wikipedia Community. --HectorMoffet (talk) 11:23, 18 January 2014 (UTC)


 * This is really interesting, thank you. When it is decided which articles are to be featured, we could make them our Collaboration of the Week. - Lawsonstu (talk) 13:13, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study
Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 20:27, 10 February 2014 (UTC).

OMIC Publishing Group
There is a discussion related to OMICS Publishing Group and related articles at Talk:OMICS Publishing Group. Please read this discussion and the other discussions over the past few days on that talk page and consider participating. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  21:19, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Sisterprojects
In the course I see little information about the sisterprojects of Wikipedia. I think, especially new contributers, would love the wikiversities, where they can share content, questions, etc. without the demands of content that is suitable for Wikipedia. Timboliu (talk) 06:33, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Archived a few threads
I've archived some inactive threads to subsections which were notifications about discussions that have since been closed. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 03:51, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Cirt, thanks for this. The fact that the WikiProject Open Access and Communicate OER archives are now merged does make it hard to tell which conversations happened in which WikiProject though; they had long individual histories before they began collaborating. Not sure whether people think that's an issue or not. - Lawsonstu (talk) 08:42, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * @Cirt, thanks for taking care of that. @Lawsonstu, you make a good point -- but personally, I'm not too worried about it. I think the important discussions are in the future! If somebody really needs to find a past discussion, I'm not too worried about the difficulty imposed by having to navigate that confusion. (If somebody disagrees, I'm happy to entertain suggestions of course.) -Pete (talk) 02:27, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

"Writing Wikipedia Articles" course starting up soon -- we will be using this talk page!
Hi, in case any of you have missed it, our course Writing Wikipedia Articles will be starting up in a week. As discussed last fall, we are going to try something new: instead of having a separate talk page for our course, we are going to direct our students to this talk page. The purpose is to help them get used to working within a WikiProject from the start; we hope this will make it easier for at least some of our students to remain active in improving articles relating to openness after the course is complete.

What this means for WikiProject members is that you will probably see more activity here than you're used to, and it may not all be directly relevant -- especially in the first couple of weeks, when students will have general questions about working on Wikipedia. I hope you will be patient with this, and if you are so inclined, I would love to see you stepping in to answer questions or work alongside our students.

This is all a little experimental, so please feel free to reach out if you see problems, opportunities, etc. If you want to contact me privately, here's a an email contact form you can use. Thanks! -Pete (talk) 03:41, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Moved posts from old WIKISOO class talk page
Had to roll a few comments over as part of the restructuring of the WIKISOO class pages - see below. Pete is notifying affected users today! - Sara FB (talk) 18:56, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

OMICS Group/Separate page required
Please see for notability: written that the group is into various businesses:


 * Educational Society- Holding around 6000 students from primary school level to degree level


 * Films and movies- turnover of INR 300 Crores / 65 Million USD Business as per the box office records


 * Conferences- only publishing group organizing scientific conferences; world-wide conferences and the largest conference organizer; organizing around 100 conferences per year


 * Health TV Channel- 1st Health Channel; monitored exclusively by OMICS Group; operating in English, Hindi and Telugu languages


 * Scientific Alliance- Collaboration with more than 150 non-profit scientific associations


 * Journals- operating 350 open access journals for the sake of disseminating knowledge for free

Since Journals is just a part of the business, a general page is of course required. The page is being redirected again and again to OMICS Publishing Group.

To prove the matter, please refer to reliable sources published on Group page

A case should be opened for discussion and consideration with above notability Lizia7(talk) 05:32, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

the time zone converter url seems lead to a wrong set of time.
Hi teachers and assistants in this course,

As title, I registered the course, and the teacher is awesome enough to send me a pre-notice to inform me about the time of this course, but I find its 18 February instead of 25 February when you click the following link:


 * Classes are 7:00pm to 9:30pm Tuesdays, Central Standard time (USA).here to see the time in a time zone near you.

Should that be fixed?

--shangkuanlc (talk) 06:08, 22 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Oh dear -- my error, thank you @Shangkuanlc! The time of day, and day of the week, are correct..but I will fix the date now. -Pete (talk) 19:40, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Looking Forward to Learning
OER is great! 2Bulldogs2Bulldogs (talk) 02:22, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Not working in Firefox?
For some reason Education Program:School of Open/WIKISOO (February 2014) does not load properly in Firefox (it does in Chrome). I cannot try it on another computer ATM, could be just my unique problem - but you may want to try it out just in case. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:34, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a problem with the video, which seems to come up in both Firefox and Chrome (at least some editions). Is that the issue, or is it something else? I am mostly using Firefox (most recent, Linux and Windows) and am not aware of other issues. -Pete (talk) 16:52, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Works OK for me in Firefox too. Piotrus, has this been resolved? - Sara FB (talk) 23:06, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Resources of interest?
Perhaps my Prezi lectures on Wikipedia will be of interest to you? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:56, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

This is great work Piotrus! It must have taken you fortune time! By the way,I always thought using prezi needed me to have a resident program like "power point". I am overjoyed it does not appear so. Vkizza (talk) 09:15, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Starting to write Wikipedia articles
I am just about tp take the course on how to write Wiki articles at the course #WIKISOO Although I have used it before, and even been writing myself and above that have been developed a course in Wiki I decicded to start from the beginning again So a Wiki about.. EbbaOssiannilsson (talk) 13:46, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Ebba, welcome to the course, and we look forward to talking about what article(s) you want to work on! Feel free to share your thoughts here any time; in Week 3 we will ask all students to choose an article for their final projects, but brainstorming and making smaller edits in the meantime is a great way to get going. -Pete (talk) 01:43, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Welcome new WIKISOO students!
Welcome new students! Feel free to use this page for any and all class correspondence. After you log in at top right, you can sign your posts by typing four tildes (see example at top of page). See you in class on 25 Feb - watch your email for the link! - Sara FB (talk) 17:47, 19 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I am testing this talk feature as a student in the course Hcsankar (talk) 00:49, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Test successful, @Hcsankar! Note that I put a colon at the beginning of your comment (and two at the beginning of mine) -- that creates an indent, which is a common way to differentiate one person's reply to another. See you in class tomorrow! -Pete (talk) 02:22, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It's always helpful to me to work on something really complex - like the literacy of open educational resources - by stepping out and actually doing it, not just talking about it. So thanks for this opportunity. - Randolph.hollingsworth (talk) 02:12, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Creating a table
For the Creative Commons license article, I'd like help figuring out whether it's appropriate and, if so, how to create (or recreate) the compatibility chart that helps determine which CC license can apply to an adaptation. Thanks in advance for any clues. —Litjade (talk) 00:24, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Litjade, according to the information at the bottom of that FAQ, all of the information on the FAQ page can be re-used under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License . Hope this answered your question. Huangpo (talk) 01:59, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Huangpo, thank you for answering the first part of my question. Whew, that's a great start! I'll write back here, once I figure out what Wikipedia help page instructs on how to create a chart. —Litjade (talk) 11:45, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Image permissions problem
Hi all~! The WIKISOO class is marvelous. Thank you.

I'm trying it to resolve an image permissions issue.

It is in regards to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ART/MEDIA

This writer of this message has uploaded an image of Jenny Holzer. But apparently a bot took it down.

I (the writer of this message, an class participant) am the owner of the image, the keeper of the archive. It was and is a not for profit historical project from the 1980's on open-source artwork in the public domain for a public audience.

The writer of this message has sent emails with the email permission of the gallery representative of the person being depicted (who agrees), and permissions of the person holding he camera that shot the image (who agrees). All parties involved agree that it is ok to post this image as a creative commons image on the above mentioned wikipedia page.

Yet the image was deleted. The writer of this "talk" has tried to reupload it, but it is being intercepted as "previously deleted" and is unable to do so.

What else can happen or should one just move on and not worry about it?

Ms. Holzer was an important contributor to this project, producing 40+ public billboards, so it would be really great to include her, but for some reason WP is not honoring the email permissions and licensing permissions.

Thanks, hope to hear back about this. Netherzone (talk) 03:59, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Netherzone. I don't have an answer or a clue but wonder if it matters whether the photo is being uploaded from your computer or a public/published space on the internet? —Litjade (talk) 12:37, 5 March 2014 (UTC) Addendum: Look below for Pete's reply. (Yay!) —Litjade (talk) 12:46, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Is there a collapsable section feature?
Does Wikipedia have a feature for collapsing sections, using tree and branch functions? Huangpo (talk) 02:03, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi, Huangpo. In case useful, I took a look at the template for the Open navbox and found this segment of code: |state = autocollapse| . I also took a look at the infobox on the top right of the OECD article, and the show/hide feature of listing country membership is in this segment of code: {{collapsible list . —Litjade (talk) 12:28, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info, Litjade! It helped me to locate the Template:Collapsible_sections_option page with an example of use: Template:American_Civil_War. Huangpo (talk) 19:23, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Test comment
Hi, fellow current/future Wikipedians --2Bulldogs (talk) 02:02, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi 2Bulldogs! Any questions? Post away! - Sara FB (talk) 00:15, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi from Aboluay
Just saying hi to everyone. I missed the first week, but I am working on catching up... I hope we collaborate to learn from each other. AboluayTalk2me 19:01, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Welcome Aboulay. Feel free to contact any of us for assistance! This is a GREAT place to post questions. - Sara FB (talk) 00:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Wiki markup cheat sheet - and time change?
Thought WIKISOO students might like this "cheatsheet" for learning wiki markup! See you in class tomorrow - please check the main course page to see if your class time might have shifted due to US "daylight savings" (summer time) - Sara FB (talk) 01:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Signator or registered editor question
Hi WIKISOO peeps,

I'm doing the homework, and must have spaced out on the part where we register ourselves as a signature or registered editor. Does the mean the quadruple "tilde" four squiggly marks, or is this something more elaborate? Netherzone (talk) 00:17, 9 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Netherzone, I think you've gotten two separate things crossed up. The first is important, and I think you've got it down -- it's just to use four tildes ( ~ ) at the end of your comments on a talk page, so that your signature and date stamp shows up. It looks like you're doing that right -- your signature above is just fine!


 * The other thing is entirely optional, just for fun. If you like, you can add the box shown at the right to your user page, by adding the code anywhere on your user page. Hope that makes sense! -Pete (talk) 05:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Added this page to my Watchlist!
It just occurred to me that I could add this page to my Watchlist and receive an email when new comments or sections are added. Your Watchlist link is on the top right of your page. It is a useful feature for the perpetually lazy (like me). Huangpo (talk) 21:27, 6 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Huangpo, what a great suggestion! I'm off to do that right now. Ajm72 (talk) 04:11, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for mentioning that @Huangpo! I did suggest this in the first session, but it probably got lost in the mix for a lot of students. Glad you figured it out! -Pete (talk) 05:29, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Question - Photo deleted, but did get permissions
Not sure if this is being posted in the right place, but here it goes again…

Hi all~! The WIKISOO class is marvelous. Thank you!

I'm trying it to resolve an image permissions issue.

It is in regards to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ART/MEDIA

This writer of this message has uploaded an image of the artist, Jenny Holzer. But apparently a bot took it down.

The writer of this message, a class participant, am the owner of the image, the keeper of the archive. It is not an image of myself nor used for self promotion, or profit, rather for historical archival and educational purposes.

It was and is a not-for-profit historical project from the 1980's on an early open-source public artwork in the public domain for a public audience.

The writer of this message has sent emails with the email permission attached from the gallery representative of the person being depicted, and also permissions of the person holding he camera that shot the image. All parties involved agree that it is ok to post this image as a creative commons image on the above mentioned wikipedia page.

Yet the image was deleted.

The writer of this "talk" has tried to reupload it, but it is being intercepted as "previously deleted" and is therefore unable to do so.

What else can happen to move this forward, if anything?

Ms. Holzer was an important contributor to this project, producing 40+ public art billboards, therefore it would be really great to include her, but for some reason WP is not honoring the email permissions and licensing permissions.

Thanks, hope to hear back about this. Netherzone (talk) 04:16, 5 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Netherzone, I managed to find the address of the photo you uploaded, by looking at the edit history of the ART/MEDIA article (even though the photo has been deleted). The address is useful, because if you click it you will see a message about who deleted it and why (in the pink box). See here: commons:File:Jenny Holzer.jpg


 * So, what happened is this: a person deleted the file from Commons (and it looks to me like the email you sent just didn't get processed fast enough); and then a bot removed the link to the deleted picture from the Wikipedia article.


 * Since you did send an email to the OTRS system like I discussed in class, I think this is a "disconnect" between OTRS and Commons. This happens sometimes -- Commons typically allows 7 days or so for things to be sorted out, but sometimes it takes longer. It's possible that it will all be resolved without you needing to do anything, if the email you sent in was sufficient.


 * I will keep an eye on this and advise further as it progresses.


 * Also, a clerical note -- due to an error in our course pages, you did indeed post your message in a different place than I intended...but I have fixed the problem, and moved your comment here. Hopefully you see this response -- sorry for the confusion. You're getting a crash course in how stuff doesn't always work as expected in wiki land!! :) But we will get it all sorted out in the end. -Pete (talk) 06:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hope I'm responding to this in the right way and place. Firstly, thank you, Sara & Bob very much for the WIKISOO class. You are all awesome and I really appreciate your patience with the students! Secondly, thank you for the detective work you did on my disappearing image! I got a couple more emails today stating deletion in the near future, so I resent my permissions to the permissions email list. Like Ouroborous - a snake eating it's own tail - the inner alchemy of Wikipedia reveals itself in endless cycles of creation and destruction! It all leads to transformation, thankfully! Netherzone (talk) 03:06, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Ack! I meant to say, THANK YOU Pete, Sara & Bob! Hope I'm responding to this in the right way and place. Firstly, thank you, Sara & Bob very much for the WIKISOO class. You are all awesome and I really appreciate your patience with the students! Secondly, thank you for the detective work you did on my disappearing image! I got a couple more emails today stating deletion in the near future, so I resent my permissions to the permissions email list. Like Ouroborous - a snake eating it's own tail - the inner alchemy of Wikipedia reveals itself in endless cycles of creation and destruction! It all leads to transformation, thankfully! Netherzone (talk) 03:06, 6 March 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Netherzone (talk • contribs)


 * Ooh, I loved being thanked for no work at all on my part! All thanks due to my colleagues I believe! :) - Sara FB (talk) 00:18, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Glad this seems to be moving forward -- please let me know if you hit another snag! -Pete (talk) 05:30, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

May have goofed adding content to OER page. Feedback please.
Hello Pete, Snarfa & Bob,

I may have overstepped the homework parameters -- I added content and two citations to the OER before asking if that was ok on that talk page.

My contribution is copied below, and please let me know if this was incorrect protocol, and if this historical antecedent should have been placed somewhere else on Wikipedia. (Or is irrelevant to the OER discussion.)

Learning curve!

Here is what I added…

An historical antecedent to consider is the pedagogy of artist Joseph Beuys and the founding of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1993. After co-creating with his students, in 1967, the German Student Party, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post in 1972 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsselforf. The institution did not approve of the fact that he permitted 50 students who had been rejected from admission to study with him. The Free University became increasingly involved in political and radical actions calling for a revitalization and restructuring of educational systems.[26] [27] Netherzone (talk) 22:58, 10 March 2014 (UTC) Netherzone (talk) 22:58, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Netherzone, this is very good writing (I haven't looked at the citations). Unless a change is potentially controversial in some way, BE BOLD is never a bad idea! :) My main concern were I myself an active editor of the OER article might be that this looks like it is related to Open Education but perhaps not Open Educational Resources... in the sense that OER are the materials an open educator might use for open education. Now, this might be a question for the OER talk page.... -Sara FB (talk) 00:23, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Let me just underscore what Sara said about boldly adding the content -- good job! It's (almost) always possible to sort out questions of where content might live, after the fact. No strong opinion from me on that where it should go -- but I do think bringing it up for discussion at Talk:Open educational resources is a good idea!


 * (Why did I say "almost" above? Well, sometimes on a hugely controversial article -- say, Global warming -- or an article that has been approved as a Featured Article, you might find that people are not so receptive to a change that hasn't been discussed first. But for most articles you encounter, you needn't worry about that too much!) -Pete (talk) 05:50, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

To use a hyphen or not?
A discussion has been initiated on the talk page of the Open access article regarding the usage on hyphens in the phrase 'open access'. I would appreciate it if WikiProject Open Access members would let their feelings known there. Thanks! - Lawsonstu (talk) 09:05, 17 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Lawsonstu, sorry not to weigh in sooner. These things get under my own skin a bit. ;) Personally I would apply The Chicago Manual of Style here as in all cases; open access would not be hyphenated unless it were forming a descriptor placed prior to a noun. So I might talk about "open-access textbooks" but "my text book is open access." However, this would have to be implemented uniformly and in all cases/articles, which is probably impossible as most people are unaware of this style nuance. Hence I rarely bother to tweak any Wikipedia article in this direction, especially for terms most commonly recognized without the hyphen. Happily I see the Wikipedia Manual of Style agrees with me: "Many compounds that are hyphenated when used attributively (adjectives before the nouns they qualify: a light-blue handbag, a 34-year-old woman) or substantively (as a noun: she is a 34-year-old), are usually not hyphenated when used predicatively (descriptive phrase separated from the noun: the handbag was light blue, the woman is 34 years old). Where there would otherwise be a loss of clarity, a hyphen may optionally be used in the predicative usage as well (hand-fed turkeys, the turkeys were hand-fed)." So that's my own view, complemented by documentation! Hope that is helpful, however belatedly. - Sara FB (talk) 01:14, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you, that is helpful! I should post a summarising comment on Talk:Open_access. I think I've decided not to try and police any one particular usage across Wikipedia, because as you say it's probably an impossible task. It's probably best to aim for consistency within the Open access article and leave it at that. - Lawsonstu (talk) 07:44, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Dumb question...
How do I make the badges on my profile page line up vertically instead of horizontally? Thanks for the help! Agathafrye (talk) 00:01, 8 March 2014 (UTC)agathafrye


 * Hi @Agatha, not dumb at all! This can be a frustrating thing to deal with. One way to do it is by using the clear template; I've demonstrated how to do that on your userpage. Hope that helps! -Pete (talk) 01:57, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Peter! 199.250.57.231 (talk) 00:10, 12 March 2014 (UTC)agathafrye

Link to claim our final project article
Instructions for how to claim our final project article directs to last year's (Round 3) list of students. Shouldn't we go to the current class of February 2014 welcome page instead? Just sayin'. —Litjade (talk) 23:56, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * YIKES~! My mistake. Thanks Jade, I'll get right on that! -Pete (talk) 02:40, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Open Access Reader
Looks like most of the people who watch this page already know about this, but just in case:

There's lots of great research being published in good quality open access journals that isn't cited in Wikipedia. It's peer reviewed, so it should count as a reliable source. It's available for anyone to read and probably comes with pretty decent metadata too. Can we set up a process to make it super convenient for editors to find and cite these papers? Here's my proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Open_Access_Reader

Please take a look, comment, discuss! EdSaperia (talk) 11:17, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

@EdSaperia, I've looked through this and am impressed -- it seems like a very useful idea. Best of luck with it, and thanks for sharing it here! -Pete (talk) 20:05, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia delete bots keep deleting my photos
Hi WiKISOO classmates and our beloved teachers! I keep running into the problem of Bots deleting images that I either own, or are copyright free, or I have permission to use from Wikimedia Commons.

I think it is because I do not know what the various licensing codes mean and am not "checking the right boxes", or I'm somehow not submitting emails properly that prove that I have permission or that I outright own (and/or) have taken the photos and releasing the rights. Today two more images were deleted by Filedelinkerbot. Any and all advice is welcome! Netherzone (talk) 03:37, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking the question. I regret that this is problematic. This happens to lots of people. The explanation for this is that Wikipedia enforces stricter controls over copyright than any other community website, and that it is complicated for the community here to review by volunteers what at any other point in history would only be done by lawyers.
 * My first recommendation is to watch the files you upload on Commons and then login to Commons at least weekly for a few weeks after you upload files. If you do this, you will see alerts when there are problems, then you can ask for help resolving them.
 * You have at least one file uploaded and documented correctly - File:Steina-and-Woody-1986.jpg. Whatever you did there was correct.
 * One problem may be that permission can only come from the copyright holder, and the copyright holder is the person who took the picture or video unless the uploader proves otherwise. Whenever you say, "I took this picture and I give permission" then there should never be trouble. If you say anything other than that, then things get more complicated. If you ever say something other than that, post here or post on Commons and someone can help you sort the details.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  14:04, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * @Blue Rasberry, thanks for stepping in -- good advice.
 * @Netherzone, you've inadvertently stumbled into something that is more complex than it would appear! you've done a good job handling it so far. As BR notes, one of your images is in good shape; another one is as well, it's on Wikipedia and could be moved to Commons, but everything seems to be in order: File:International Uranium Film Festival.jpg.


 * There is at least one remaining image, right? It should be here, but as you say has been re-deleted: File:Jenny-Holzer 1986.jpg Please check back in your email for one that came from OTRS volunteer Jo Ball on March 6 (which I can see in the ticket system) -- if you can send one more email in response to that, indicating concisely and specifically who owns the copyright to that file and why you are confident they have released it under a suitable license, I think it will all be fine.


 * One side note -- I see that you pursued this with the person who deleted the file, here. He's not really in a position to help -- he's trying to point you toward the person who can (the person who emailed you). He doesn't disbelieve you, but is trying to get things documented in such a way that he can proceed with confidence. It's important to the way Wikipedia works that people in a position of trust (like him) not do things too far "out of process," and in this case the process demands that somebody in a different position of trust (Jo Ball) get it documented in the email ticket system.


 * I know this is maddening -- sorry you have happened on such a complex situation with your first effort! Not everything on Wikipedia is this complicated, I promise :) I'm sure we will get it sorted out. -Pete (talk) 01:31, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

I am not maddened at all, I'm very grateful, yet confused. Trying to follow rules and protocols. I will take your advise @User:bluerasberry and @user:peteforsyth to try to troubleshoot and learn and correct. When I find a moment will read back thru messages and look for March 6 volunteer Jo Ball's. And when find time will try to sort out the Wikimedia Commons licensing process. THANK YOU, this is a tremendous education, and I am grateful. Netherzone (talk) 01:41, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Ack! Even more of my images (that I own) are being removed by bots and humans on wikimedia commons! These are my images, and I own them and want them to be free, but OCD machines and fingers keep tampering with my good intentions. Please explain, when one of our fearless leaders finds the time, which license do I choose to say "ITS OK, LET IT STAY, IT'S MINE, I'M GIFTING IT TO THE WORLD, IT IS FREE" and pretty please don't delete my work. Netherzone (talk) 03:54, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikimania
Wikimania 2014 is approaching, and the deadline for submissions is 31 March. There have been over 160 submissions so far, including a number in the Open Scholarship theme such as Open Access & Wikipedia: A Panel Discussion. - Lawsonstu (talk) 11:07, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Stu thanks for posting here -- I will remind our class as we are moving toward conclusion! -Pete (talk) 21:41, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Reference List - how is it organized?
I missed class last week and was already trying to catch up, so I'm taking a chance that this hasn't been covered.

I was going to check references on the MOOC pageand got side-tracked wondering how they were organized.
 * In this case, the list doesn't appear to sort by the last name of the author/editor.
 * It doesn't seems to be in the order they were added.
 * I see each entry begins with an up-arrow/caret and some entries have superscript letters after the caret, but the latter is scattered around.
 * I understand there's not a set format, so there probably isn't a way to sort by the reference's publication date.

Does this matter or is it further down the priorty list after correct, readable content and active links?

Thanks, EternaLearner (talk) 21:05, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @EternaLearner, we covered some of this in an earlier class session, but it can be confusing! As a general rule, the footnotes will be presented in the order they occur in the article text, but some things can happen to throw that off a little.
 * That carat symbol ( ^ ) at the beginning of the line is a link to the place where the footnote occurs in the text. Click it, and your browser will jump up to that position in the article.
 * When a reference is used as a footnote in multiple places in the article, instead of the carat, you will get superscript letters like [a] [b] etc. Those letters take over the function of the carat: each is a link to a place in the article that uses that footnote.
 * So, the main reason the order might get a little messed up is when a single source is referenced multiple times.
 * The short answer about sorting is, no, sadly there is no way within Wikipedia to sort according to author name or publication date. If you are handy with text processing and code, it might be possible to cook something up by pasting the references into a text editor and then sorting them; but it might be an exercise in frustration. Let me know if that's something you'd like to pursue, though! -Pete (talk) 22:04, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Self-paced student
Hi there,

I'm a self-paced student and just watched the first week video. I wanted to know if there are things to do absolutely before a deadline (which one) in order to complete the course in time. Just to see if it's possible for me to complete it.

Otherwhise, I will just go through the videos at my own pace even after the end of the course.

English is not my mother tongue, so excuse any grammar hiccup and feel free to correct me :D

It is also the occasion to respond to 's welcome message to self-paced student in the first class: Hi Pete! Thanks for acknowledging us.

Ogoletti (talk) 12:53, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Ogoletti and welcome! While you are welcome to take the course at whatever pace you like, we do find that there is a great deal of value in asking questions and sharing your work with the class. So the more you can get done before the class is over (first week of April), I think the more satisfying it will be; keep coming back here to ask questions, see what others are asking about, and share your work. The "final project" is the main feature of the course, so if you can choose an article and start making small edits, or just thinking about what you might like to do, you will be off to a great start.
 * In the main banner above, you will find (new) links to "final project" and "badges." Take a look at the Final Project page, and also look through the course pages for Weeks 1-4. I would suggest that you choose a final project in the next week, even if you do not feel ready to start doing a lot of work on it yet; that way you can start thinking about what you would like to do with the article, and ask questions, which will put you at a similar place with the rest of the class.
 * I hope this helps. Keep the questions coming if you want further guidance! -Pete (talk) 22:10, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Comparing Self-paced to live
I have to miss the live class tonight but view it as an opportunity to experience the self-paced option. (I've also fallen behind on my homework, so will use this as an opportunity to catch up.) I expect to prefer the live intereaction but am pleased to have an alternative to missing the class entirely. See you live next week! EternaLearner (talk) 20:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi EternaLearner. Class was a blast! When you have a chance to review the session, you'll find lots of information not only in the video archive (not sure if that also contains the chat window) but also in the etherpad notes. See you next week! —Litjade (talk) 01:00, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * @EternaLearner, I hope you've had a chance to catch up. Join us today either way. :) - Sara FB (talk) 23:03, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Sara, did make it to class but it look like Thurs. will be catchup/make up day. Appreciate your support!EternaLearner (talk) 01:24, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

How a start class article becomes a C or B class?
I've been reading through some of the notes and discussion from this week. I understand the process for nominating an article for good article status. What I don't understand is how an article moves from start level status to C status or B status. For example I have been doing some edits on a start level article International Scale of River Difficulty. When I started editing it had various issues with formatting, references, and misc information. After discussing these issues on the talk page, I made substantial edits and improved the article. It probably needs considerable expanding before it is ready for GA status, but could probably pass for C or even B status at this point. How does that happen? Ryanx7 (talk) 04:53, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * @Ryan, based on a brief look at your comments and changes to the article, and it looks great!


 * The process for status changes below the good article quality rating are much less formalized; they are generally handled by WikiProjects, and they are generally not the subject of a whole lot of discussion. Based on my quick review, I do think it's likely that you have met the criteria for C class. And in order to earn the badge in this course, all you really have to do is persuade us, the course instructors. But I suggest, since there are still a few weeks left in the course, that you investigate a bit more yourself. Try this:
 * Find the two WikiProjects listed at the top of the Talk page for your article.
 * On each WikiProject page, find how they define the "quality scale" and how they approach assessments. You might find that it's pretty generic, or that the WikiProject has created their own criteria. Do you think you have met the B class or C class criteria as defined those WikiProjects?
 * Leave a message on each of their talk pages requesting feedback. Let them know you're in this class if you like; ask if anybody in the project has any suggestions for where the article should go. You might want to point out that it has a high "importance" rating in each project as well!
 * Another option you could try out is a peer review. This is a more general call for input and feedback, which is not directly related to a specific quality rating.
 * If you feel that you have met the requirements with this article, and/or would like to take on something else, we would encourage you to take a stab at any of the Open Education-related articles listed here: WikiProject Open/OER. Also, I think there are students here who are still getting going on their final projects; perhaps you could find somebody to help out who has not gotten as far as you? Often, helping somebody else with Wikipedia is one of the best ways to deepen your own understanding.
 * At any rate, good work -- thanks for sharing. Please let us know how your WikiProject explorations go! -Pete (talk) 20:19, 14 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the advice. I was just getting the hang of the editing process with these rafting related articles.  I plan to tie in to an education topic for my final project.  Specifically I am interested in in creating an article on Public Sphere Pedagogy.  Loving the course so far.  Ryanx7 (talk) 23:14, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * , this looks like a great choice -- I had never heard the term 'Public Sphere Pedagogy,' but am glad to learn about this anchor concept from the world of philosophy and educational theory. I look forward to seeing your contributions -- and also would encourage you, where relevant, to work in links and explanatory notes into articles like open education, open educational resources, and MOOC -- more people will likely look at those articles, so it's good to provide context for the general reader looking into these more timely concepts. -Pete (talk) 16:36, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Pushing out too much content at once
I just started working on a generic template for updating a bunch of red links for districts of the city of São Paulo. Only about 2/3rds of the city's 96 districts currently have an article at all—even in Portuguese there are still just 93/96. The work required to get something published for each of the 39 red links is not very intensive: a little bit of translation, some quick link checking, etc. I figure it would take me about 10–15 min. per article.

My question is this… Do I run the risk of having all my work thrown out if I publish a bunch of new stub pages in a short amount of time? I’m working in my sandbox now, but once I get going, these 3 dozen pages will be ready to go live in short order.--giso6150 (talk) 22:04, 15 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @giso, this is a cool project. Since I am not familiar with Sao Paulo, I can't tell you offhand whether each district would be considered notable. As you probably remember, the general notability guideline requires that any Wikipedia article should have a few references to high quality, independent reliable sources, at least some of which focus on the article's topic. In some cases there are more specific guidelines, but I don't know of any for a district or a neighborhood. If you have a couple of good sources for each, you should probably be OK -- feel free to post a question here again if you want us to consider the sources you are planning to use.
 * So I think you would do well to investigate notability a little. Of the articles that do exist, how thorough are the citations? do you see on any of their talk pages whether anybody has brought up notability, or proposed that they be deleted? Another thing you might consider is leaving a note at the talk page of WP:WikiProject Brazil and/or WP:WikiProject Cities, to see if anybody there has an opinion of whether these districts are notable enough for their own Wikipedia article.
 * Have you seen this article? Subdivisions of São Paulo -- you might think about how you could link between your new articles and this "central" article. -Pete (talk) 21:55, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

These are all great suggestions, Pete. I will definitely look at each of those places that you suggested before I get going in earnest. In the meantime, I have decided to go a different—more straight-forward—route for this course's final project. I think my enthusiasm was a bit out of proportion for the amount of time and energy I really have to put into this. That seems to be a pretty common phenomenon. --giso6150 (talk) 23:32, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds good . If I were you, I would leave a note on my userpage capturing my thinking on the concept -- that way if I want to come back to it in, say, a year or so, I have my notes to work from. Looking forward to seeing what you do take on! -Pete (talk) 16:54, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

The Ideal Stub
Many of you are working on starting a new article, and wondering when is the best time to "publish" it to Article space. This page is a really good guide to what a good "stub" (or minimal Wikipedia article) looks like: WP:IDEALSTUB Pinging: -Pete (talk) 16:58, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Non English language natives
Hi, I'm from Venezuela, and my mother languages is the spanish, of course.

My contributions in spanish wikipedia articles don't show in my account, and my user page is different for the course and for spanish wikipedia. For example, in this course my user page exist, but when I see my profile from an spanish article, my user name is red. But is the same user name ever.

Why did occur? thanks

And I want to know if not-english articles are valid for this course, because is better for me, and I need and be more usefull writting in spanish wikipedia.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Rsael (talk • contribs) 23:49, 10 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Rsael, thanks for asking -- it can be confusing! English Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia are separate web sites, but your user account will work on both of them. Yes, if you want a user page on both, you have to create one in each place. (It is common to link from one to the other. You can use this format if you want to do that, using the "en" (English) or "es" (Spanish) language code: w:es:User:Rsael This will produce a link that looks like this: w:es:User:Rsael


 * For this course, certainly you are welcome to work on an article in another language. I do not speak much Spanish, so it will be a little difficult for me to assess your work; but that is no problem, I will find somebody to help out. In fact, we have already had a student who worked on the Spanish article about Open Educational Resources for his final project: Recursos educativos abiertos So you will be in good company! -Pete (talk) 05:21, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Not sure how to respond to a question. But I am bold and try ;). I wanted to upload a picture to commons and so encounter the Unified_login issue. Is there a 'unified profile' thing ? Or do I also have to link to my profiles like described here above? If this does not exist, it would be a nice feature to be able to define a user profile in one language (at commons level) and provide translations for other wikipedia languages. Ogoletti (talk) 16:53, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I believe you need a separate profile in each case, @Ogoletti - but Pete can confirm! You can also point users from one to another.... -Sara FB (talk) 23:01, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Ogoletti: The software should automatically create an account for you in each "project" (English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons are each considered a "project"). On occasion there are problems with this, for instance, if somebody has registered the same username on a different project before you log into it; but I don't think that is the case here.
 * So, I don't know what the problem is. Can you try again, and paste the exact URL, or the exact error message text, that you see when you run into problems? That will help me track it down. -Pete (talk) 23:16, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Pete: Just to be clear, I have the unified login. I was wondering for a kind of 'unified user page'. And if this doesn't exist, where can we propose new features for wikimedia/mediawiki ? Tks Ogoletti (talk) 08:02, 19 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , sorry, I misunderstood. No, there is no such thing, and I agree it would be nice if there were an option for that. Since each Wikimedia project is a separate web site, there is no obvious way to have the same user page show up on all sites; but there are two options that might be worth exploring, and that might be fairly easy to accomplish with a bot (at least, for somebody who knows how to create bots, which isn't me :) -- like this:
 * Give the user an option of copying their userpage to an arbitrary collection of other-language-projects via a simple interface; or
 * Give the user an option of creating soft redirects on a number of sites (for an example, see: w:de:User:Peteforsyth)
 * For several reasons I could go into later, I think #2 is probably the more viable option. If you'd like to work together to make a proposal around that, I'd be very happy to! Very worthwhile proposal. But it's a bit outside the scope of the course, so until the end of the course I might not have a lot of time to put into it. -Pete (talk) 17:54, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Uploading an audio file
Experimenting with this. I recorded a brief welcome message using Audacity, exported the file in ogg vorbis format, uploaded to Wikipedia and placed the file on my user page. Wikipedia provides the spiffy player. ggatin (talk) 04:56, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks like I missed this note! Congrats on getting audio to work on Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia only allows free formats for audio and video, and since those formats are not supported by a lot of software, this can be rather notoriously difficult to do! Please post back if you do any further experimenting. One use for audio files is to do audio recordings of articles -- you'll find those recordings have been done for many featured articles. If anybody enjoys narrating, this could be a fun (but probably time-consuming) project! -Pete (talk) 20:28, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

A useful source
Anybody interested in working on Wikipedia articles about OER organizations (WIKISOO students included!) may want to look at this web page: http://whyopenedmatters.org/blog/2012/04/05/who-creates-open-educational-resources/

It seems to be a good source of basic, overview information about a number of organizations. It could also probably contribute to notabilty claims for any of the organizations it covers (along with additional independent reliable sources). -Pete (talk) 21:11, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject Assessment Statistics
Last week I was using the assessment statistics tool in a couple of the wikiprojects I am participating in. It seems to no longer work for me. Am I doing something wrong or did that tool get taken down? Ryanx7 (talk) 19:59, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Example of what I am talking about:

Click any link and you get this:https://www.dropbox.com/s/vtk9m026ca6voll/badtool.PNG Ryanx7 (talk) 20:02, 19 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , it's a sad fact about the current state of things that many tools (including page view statistics, etc.) "break" like this on occasion. We are in the midst of a painful transition where the Wikimedia Foundation is taking over functions like this as part of their "labs" site. Usually if you check back in a day or so, a tool like this will be working again. I really wish I had a better answer for you! -Pete (talk) 21:25, 19 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , I figured it was something like that. It just seemed that this was a major tool that was down (it seems like all WikiProjects use it), and there was no discussion.  Any idea where those types of conversations take place?Ryanx7 (talk) 22:08, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Spanish and Templates


Hi from Buenos Aires! I am also considering writing in Spanish. It takes longer and harder to do it in English when it is not your native language.

Templates are still a mistery to me. I wonder if there's a further explanation about them. Thanks for your clear tuition. CARMENFACET (talk) 21:24, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

"tuition"? Perhaps you had meant "explanation"MaynardClark (talk) 05:01, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Carmen, glad to know you will be more comfortable working in Spanish! Some of the rules and processes of Spanish Wikipedia are a bit different from English, but what you learn here should give you a good general introduction. I will look for some good resources about templates. You may want to start with Help:Template -- I will come back and post any other resources I find. -Pete (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Pete! Many thanks for your answer. I will check your suggestion and will look forward to the promised resources about templates.190.231.116.224 (talk) 23:42, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, I made an 8 minute video explaining templates, now embedded above. I hope this answers your questions -- let me know if you have further questions! -Pete (talk) 06:48, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Carmen, here's a more detailed video I found, describing how to create a infobox for an article. Maybe this is a good complement to my intro! -Pete (talk) 22:40, 14 March 2014 (

Many thanks. Very useful. I just have to practice now. Just one question: it is clear that it is not possible to add parameters to a template, now, is it possible to eliminate one or more?190.230.66.102 (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Carmen, here's some more information about templates and parameters in the Help files - I hope you can find what you need here! Trial and error in your own sandbox is always a great way to test things out. Remember to sign into your account, by the way, and sign your posts with four tildes (~)! Hope to see you in class - Sara FB (talk) 22:53, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Snarfa ! Many thanks. I will practice and come back to you if any question. CARMENFACET (talk) 00:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't fully understand your question -- it is possible to both add and remove parameters for an existing template, but it can be a little complicated. Can you tell us more specifically what you are trying to do, with a link? -Pete (talk) 17:59, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Pete! It is just a general question. In the second video you sent me it is said with a note in red that parameters cannot be added but do not mention about removing. Now you tell me that both adding and removing is possible... I haven't still an specific case. I guess I need to experience more. Many thanks.CARMENFACET (talk) 00:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Uploading photos
Hi again... I tried to upload a photo of Buenos Aires for my User article from Wiki-Commons photographs for Argentina and nothing happen when clicking insert button after writing all the data. However, I could insert an image from Google. Of course it doesn't fulfill the requirements but gave me the idea of how to fill the corresponding form. However, what happened with the Wiki Commons photo? Why I couldn't use it? Thanks for your attention. CARMENFACET (talk) 22:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @Carmen, I think I figured out where you were having trouble in one case, at least -- please look at your user page. Here is the change I made. It can be a little confusing -- the Wikimedia address for a file is not the full URL, but just the filename preceded by the word "File:". I hope that helps.

Wonderful. Very clear.Many thanks.190.230.66.102 (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * But I'm not sure if this fully answers your question? It sounds like you maybe also tried to upload a photo of your own to Wikimedia Commons. If so, something must have gone wrong, because your "user contributions" on Wikimedia Commons are empty: commons:Special:Contributions/CARMENFACET If you want to upload a photo, try starting here: commons:Special:UploadWizard And post back if you still have trouble! -Pete (talk) 01:16, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

I am looking for a nice photo to upload with all the requirements. Anyway I'm encouraging friends who take very nice photos to do it themselves since it seems to be simpler that way.190.230.66.102 (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2014 (UTC) CARMENFACET (talk) 00:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Adding "Public Sphere Pedagogy" to OER articles list
Great new article at Public Sphere Pedagogy by - adding to list of articles on open educational resources/open education! - Sara FB (talk) 17:28, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Move article from user sandbox to page space
Hello all, two questions: 1-- I've attempted to use the "move" feature (via the upside-down triangle on the menu bar) to move an article I wrote on the art historian, Linda Weintraub, to the actual article/page space of Wikipedia. I'm not sure if it worked since it is still in my sandbox. Spatial navigation in Wikipedia is still new to me, and I'm not comfortable deleting it from my sandbox, (and risk losing it) however I'm uncertain if it actually moved to a real page space. Here is a link to my sandbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netherzone/sandbox and to what appears to be the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Weintraub

2-- On on our class page, I notice next to my name there is a box to post an article - should I post the new article there? Thanks! Netherzone (talk) 15:10, 22 March 2014 (UTC)


 * On #1 -- it's published! Congratulations! If you click the first link User:Netherzone/sandbox and look in the upper right, just below the page title, you'll see that it says "redirected from User:Netherzone/sandbox." If you click that link, you'll see the "redirect" page that makes your old sandbox page point there -- and you can delete that code if you want to use the sandbox for something else. And on #2 -- yes, please do! Looks like excellent work. I look forward to reading it more closely. -Pete (talk) 21:52, 22 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Absolutely, @Netherzone and all students, add any article you're putting significant time into - especially for your final project - next to your name on the Feb class home page. That way we, and all your classmates, can see what you're up to! - Sara FB (talk) 15:46, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Bibliography vs. Further reading vs. External links
I'm interested in working on the Afrofuturism article, but am not sure of the finer differences between the Citations list and the Bibliography list. I've also seen articles use the terms "Notes" or "References" instead of "Citations" (Black science fiction and Alondra Nelson) -- is one term preferred over the other? Also, what's the difference between the Bibliography and Further Reading? See Science, technology and society for an article with Notes and Further reading but not a Bibliography. Thanks! AmandaRR123 (talk) 01:26, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Good question, . The short answer is, there is no right answer -- that is, there's no "one and only" way to structure an article. You might want to skim through WP:REFERENCES to get an overview (but it's a long page, don't feel you need to read it closely). You also might look at a few featured articles (see WP:FA) to see what structures have been used in articles that are considered very high quality.
 * As a general rule, an article should at minimum have a section for footnotes, which might be called "Footnotes" or "Notes" or "Citations" or "References." It might also have a section called "External links" for web sites that have general relevance to the article. It might also have a separate section (typically just below the footnotes) for major works that were heavily consulted for the article -- usually books, scholarly articles, etc. That one might be called something like "Bibliography" or "Sources."
 * In some cases, the "Bibliography" has the detailed bibliographic info, and the "Footnotes" section has summarized lines (like "Smith (1992), p. 42) that refer to the items in the bibliography.
 * I agree that the bottom of the Afrofuturism article is a little messy, and could use some cleanup. The best thing to do would be to find a model you think would work well for the article; then suggest it on the article's talk page; and then get to work transitioning it to that model. Keep in mind this will be a pretty technical project; if you like learning Wikipedia code and dealing with details, it will be a good learning opportunity. But if that kind of thing drives you crazy, you could probably leave most of that alone, and instead focus on building new content and tidying up the most significant references. Either approach makes sense, it depends on how you want to spend your time, and what you think will have the biggest impact for the reader. -Pete (talk) 06:50, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks ! I'm tempted to just work on adding items to the bibliography and cleaning that up, because I do like to work on fiddly things like that. That said, I also noticed that in some older versions of this article there were long lists of artists that were deleted, too. Are long lists like that generally inappropriate for an article? If not, I might also work on adding back in a tighter list of associated artists. AmandaRR123 (talk) 22:52, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to Wikiconference USA
Hello! In New York City Friday 30 May - Sunday 1 June Wikiconference USA will be held as a national United States Wikipedia meetup hosted by Wikimedia New York City and Wikimedia DC. All are welcome to attend. Scholarship applications to cover travel expenses are accepted until the end of March and presentation submissions are requested until that time but can be accepted until closer to the conference.

In previous years New York City conferences have gathered 150 attendees. At this conference we are hoping for more people to attend.

It would be nice if participants and supporters of WikiProject Open could attend. Anyone with questions may contact me or any of the other organizers, or post on the conference website.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  22:06, 12 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note about this, |Blue Rasberry - I need to visit NYC around then so will look into this! - Sara FB (talk) 03:29, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

The MOOC article
I just left a comment on the talk page of the MOOC article, one which has been largely inactive for a while. The MOOC article has turned out to be a very important one for those with an interest in open educational resources, even though many of those individuals would argue that there is nothing "open" about today's MOOCs (I'll remain neutral on that point!). In any event, I see room for some improvement so commented on that talk page with my own personal suggestions. If some WIKISOO students wanted to work together to improve the article together, I know Pete would be as eager as I am to provide feedback along the way. In any event, for those of you still deciding what to tackle for your final project, consider reaching out to your classmates and diving into this one. :) Feel free to list your names on my talk page if you need help coordinating! (See also the list here for other open educational resources-related ideas.) - Sara FB (talk) 03:42, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Chinese articles - translations or original articles then translated into English
I have the same question about Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese articles that CarmenFacet has about Spanish and English articles. MaynardClark (talk) 04:13, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Green Checkmarks for being Reviewed ("Patrolled"?)
I thought I'd just share this experience. I got a message with an icon of a green checkmark saying that my userpage was reviewed by someone. I had no idea what that meant, but took a look at his Talk Page and it seems he/she reviewed lots of other people's stuff too, and they would leave messages asking what it meant (as I wondered). He answered that, in cases I think were similar to mine, he just designated it as "OK" (not bad). I was going to confirm this on his/her Talk page but it seems like he explained this many times to many people. So assuming I'm "OK" (and if I weren't, I'd get a red X or something instead), it would probably be more helpful if my notification email about all this had an explanation like "this means you're OK/don't need to worry" or a link explaining the process, etc. So, feeling a little Bold, I thought about suggesting a feature request at Bugzilla but chickened out as I wasn't even sure if it was even worth registering an account there or not, whether that was the right place, how to search it well enough to find out if someone else suggested the same exact thing (tried to, still jargony for me) etc.DavidBoudreau (talk) 19:31, 21 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm genuinely stumped, I'm not sure what happened -- but looking into it. I think this, and several other ideas that come up, should get collected as general recommendations for Wikipedia -- I'm working on that too, I'll report back! -Pete (talk) 21:49, 22 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi @DavidBoudreau. I think this or something similar happened to me, too, when I first started setting up my user and talk pages. And when Pete checked it out, I think he explained that the "review" was a kind of verification of my user account being active. —Litjade (talk) 23:25, 25 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks @Litjade and @Pete, good to know that. Probably outside the scope of the class but, in any case, it's good to know I haven't been ostracized from Wikipedia just yet! DavidBoudreau (talk) 02:43, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

WIKISOO Userbox
I created a simple WIKISOO User box on my User page. Not sure how to make it more sharable. ggatin (talk) 04:49, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi @Gating, you did great! The userbox works. If you want to make it more shareable, you should probably create something here: Template:Userbox/WIKISOO with the syntax you used, slightly modified. You can use the Template:Userbox/Zotero userbox as a guide; once you have created it, other students will be able to add it by putting on their pages. (You might want to click "edit" on this section to see how I used colons in front of the word "Template" and also the "nowiki" tags to make this show up right!) -Pete (talk) 06:43, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Done! WIKISOO userbox available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Userbox/WIKISOO or by adding the terms "Userbox/WIKISOO" without the quotation marks and with double braces on each side.


 * How fun! Thanks! —Litjade (talk) 12:42, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Gating, this looks great -- thanks! Just one critique though, the hashtag in the image isn't what we use (and as a Wikipedia shortcut, it actually goes somewhere else entirely: WP:SOO) Can you update that to either "#WIKISOO" or "WP:WIKISOO"? -Pete (talk) 16:23, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Inspired
Based on the Wikipedia guideline to WP:Be_bold and Sara's tip to copy rather than reinvent the wheel (search for "copy" in the class notes for examples), I copied and adapted Gating's WIKISOO userbox template. The "new" (read: adapted) userbox is on my Sandbox page for now. Any suggestions for improvement are welcome! Here's the thing: when I uploaded the to Wikimedia Commons, I couldn't figure out where to say that it's based on. Shouldn't I make that attribution, because he applied a CC BY-SA license? —Litjade (talk) 14:08, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hey Litjade, so cool! I think Pete needs to answer you on this one... thanks for you help in class, it's really great! -Sara FB (talk) 00:14, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Litjade, thanks for making this! I think there are two ways of approaching your question -- (1) what is legally required by the CC BY-SA license, and (2) what is appropriate and respectful and appreciative.
 * As far as the "letter of the license" goes, although I am not a lawyer I am pretty sure you're just fine! While you may have drawn inspiration from @Gating's userbox, you did not copy any element of it that I can discern. Moreover -- and I don't mean to discount your work! -- I'm not entirely sure that either of your images is eligible for copyright. You may want to look at this page: commons:COM:TOO about the "threshold of originality." Images that are made up of basic geometric shapes and text are generally assumed to be public domain; of course interpretations of that can vary, but my understanding is that the courts have generally applied a pretty high standard.
 * However, you are right (and generous) to express your appreciation or inspiration! I think the best way to do this is just in plain English, with a link, in the "Description" field on the Commons file. (You'll see there's also a field called "other_versions" -- you could use that, it's typically used for cases where the tie between the images is stronger, but there's no harm in using it for a case like this.) Hope this helps! -Pete (talk) 05:39, 11 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Cool, thanks for creating this!Netherzone (talk) 01:17, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

@Litjade Thanks for creating your version of the template. Excited about using it on my page Camellia wagashi (talk) 02:54, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Book article Template?
I'm behind! My current strategy is to take a book I've read, Nothing to Envy, and improve its Wikipedia article. I hope that's ok... might be the best I can manage, as the days wind down. I think I can figure out the technical side of things easily enough, but I'm not as familiar with academic/journalistic encyclopedia work (what types of sources are better than others, etc). I don't have access to much else besides the Internet, and if there are free citable academic journals online, I don't yet know the best way to searching them for sources. Anyway, I was looking around for a good template, or something to give a good example of the things that a Wikipedia article on a book would have. (Articles for cities, for example, have a Geography subheading, population info, that sort of thing.) The article already has a booky-looking type of infobox. I dug up something that looked like a template of sorts today, but lost it. I see there is a Category:Books but I'm thinking there is probably a guideline or outline of how to layout an article on a book. If no one has anything, I'll just look at an example of another book's article and go off that, I guess. DavidBoudreau (talk) 15:32, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello . I make Wikipedia articles about some of the books I read as a way of keeping notes for myself. I recommend that you just copy the example of another book's article, because that is how most things work at Wikipedia. If you really want to read the guides, you could check WP:WikiProject Books and there find WikiProject_Books/Non-fiction_article as a style guide or starting point. Nothing to Envy seems like a great book to develop especially because it can be tied lots of other articles on Wikipedia. My philosophy for making book articles is to try to link their contents to existing Wikipedia articles as I did at Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, because then also I know that I can go into all those articles and develop them with that book.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  15:41, 27 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! That is helpful. DavidBoudreau (talk) 15:57, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Bump up your edit count with editbeta option
I am pretty comfortable with the progress that I’ve made on my final project, but my number of total edits was lagging way behind the goal of 200. I have been using the edit source option to edit my new article in my sandbox. It dawned on me today, though, that I could use the editbeta button instead, for some (very) quick and easy spelling edits, etc. I was able to get quite a lot done in a short period of time by simply surfing pages on my watchlist, looking for:
 * red links — lots of these actually have perfectly valid pages, but just have some problem with spelling, etc.
 * misc. bad grammar and misspelled words (the misspellings get underlined in red once you hit that editbeta button—at least using Chrome on a Mac)
 * unlinked big concepts and proper nouns… if you look at pages that you’re already interested in, these people and subjects tend to sort of jump out at you. The linking tool ∞ is helpful and intuitive; I was pleasantly surprised.

I have been doing this type of editing for a couple of years on an ad hoc basis, but always using the regular (edit source) option. Editbeta was a revelation… and a huge time-saver for those simple jobs. I hope someone finds this helpful. See you in class! —giso6150 (talk) 05:54, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Final Project (Refugio Reyes Rivas, but in the spanish wiki)
Hi everyone, I've been working on my final project; I already told you what it is about, but I'm going to do it one more time. Refugio Reyes Rivas was a very important architect in Aguascalientes, Mexico; he designed and work in many important buildings, churches and all kinds of monuments that are symbols of Aguascalientes. However, due to his humble origins and his lack of professional preparation (he was an empiric architect) he wasn't properly recognized until a few years.

But I have a lot of questions. I have two accounts in wikipedia, one in the spanish wikipedia and another in the english wikipedia. Because my project is in the spanish wikipedia, I managed more than 200 editions, while in my english wikipedia account I only managed 18. Maybe this represents a problem and I can not expect a WikiSOO Signator Badge or a WikiSOO Burba Badge. Although this is not a real issue for me, because I learned a lot in this course, and I have a lot of projects in Wikipedia.

By the way, this is the link of my final project (in progress): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Luisalvaz/Borrador

Maybe can help me with this. Thanks to all. --Luisalvaz (talk) 21:33, 26 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , thank you for sharing! Your article looks excellent from a first glance (without translating, and without me knowing much about Spanish Wikipedia's policies). Of course your 200 edits on Spanish Wikipedia will count toward the badge. When you are ready, let me know, and I will see about finding a Spanish speaking Wikipdian to read it and provide some feedback. (If any Spanish-speaking students in the course want to give Luis some feedback, I'm sure he would appreciate it!) Well done. -Pete (talk) 00:15, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks . I moved the article and is no longer a 'sand box'. This is the link: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugio_Reyes_Rivas. I decided to do this, in case some other people want to see it and give their opinion. But I have to check other sources, because there is an ambiguity about the date of born. Thanks again.--Luisalvaz (talk) 15:01, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Author section doesn't link with my user page
My the author section can't make the link to my user page? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Pierre_St-Louis.jpg The author is in red! Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 00:45, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I have found the answer my self! I had to create a user page in the Wikimedia Commons!
 * , I'm so glad to hear you found an answer -- thanks for sharing this with the class, I'm sure you're not the only one confused by this! You found a good solution (creating, essentially, a "Soft redirect on your Commons user page, to your Wikipedia user page). There's another option, which might suit you better: on the photo's page itself, you could put this for "author":
 * wikipedia:en:User:Marie-Pierre St Louis
 * That way, the person clicking the link will have a more direct path to your Wikipedia user page. (this format is known as an WP:Interwiki link.) -Pete (talk) 23:13, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * , Thanks a lot! It's good to know that! So I guess I can put any language in there, like : wikipedia:fr:Utilisateur:Marie-Pierre St Louis
 * Oui, bien sur! Mais n'utilises pas "nowiki" :) Comme ca: w:fr:Utilisateur:Marie-Pierre St-Louis ("nowiki," c'etait pour faire l'example!)
 * How is my French? It's been a while! Also: don't forget to log in and add the four tildes for your signature: ~ -Pete (talk) 04:16, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I made some mistakes in the code above! You should use "w" instead of "wikipedia" -- I have corrected it now. -Pete (talk) 23:33, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Your French is pretty good! Thanks a lot for your help! Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 18:50, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Articles in English and Spanish
My question is about how and who is in charge of linking the articles written in both languages, for instance:

. If I write the translation in Spanish of an article written en English, should I do something to link it somehow?

. When I try read the article "Argentine tango" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_tango) in Spanish, it links to "Tango Argentino -espectaculo" (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_Argentino_%28espect%C3%A1culo%29)which are not the same thing... Perhaps it should rather be link to "Tango Argentino (baile)" even when it is not its translation.

. Is it possible to rename an article ? For instgance, in this case, change "Argentine Tango" to "Tango (dance)" which is actually the proper name since Tango is a dance developed in the Rio de la Plata and both Argentina and Uruguay are involved in its creation. Tango Argentino is just the name of a show that tour around the world for many years with great success. Thanks!CARMENFACET (talk) 23:38, 24 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @CARMENTFACET @MaynardClark I'm curious too, for Japanese (and it looks like Maynard as well, for Chinese). I remember one class session touched on this, and my impression was that "English Wikipedia" is distinct from "Spanish Wikipedia" and the rest.  I've definitely noticed different content for the same article in two different languages!  (both in amount of that content, and what each one actually says)  As Wikipedia's editing process is dynamic and constantly ongoing, translations would have to be updated I guess, that's a factor.

DavidBoudreau (talk) 06:13, 25 March 2014 (UTC) @CARMENTFACET Well, I wonder whether Wikipedia SHOULD seek to harmonize the content of the various languages more. I understand that cost is involved in sponsoring more bandwidth for foreign language Wikipedias. But what impediments are there to managing the content so that in each language the content for important articles is either translated or researched more completed. I might envision some reasons of cultural sensitivity which could lead to differences in how much is said on a specific topic, but in the spirit of knowledge production, should one Wikipedia have 2-3 paragraphs while another has 7-10? MaynardClark (talk) 17:10, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

, first, on the technical end: much like images are all kept on a single, central site for all language Wikipedias (that's Wikimedia Commons), basic information (like links among language editions) are managed on a central site as well. This one is newer than Wikimedia Commons, it's called WikiData. On the left side of any Wikipedia article you will see a menu that says "Languages"; and at the bottom of that menu, a link that says "Edit links." That link will take you to the Wikidata page connected to the topic. There, you can change which article it links to on each language edition. This is not something I have done a whole lot of, so I can't give you more specifics without looking into it a little.

An article can be renamed, yes; but you should probably bring this up on the article's talk page. I am not an expert on dance, so I can only give a general answer. But I do see that there is already an article called Tango, you might want to bring this up on that page's talk page as well. Do you remember how to find out how often each page is read? It may be worth looking at that! It's in the links at the top of the "view history" page for each article.

Many thanks Pete, I could link the pages a bit more properly for the moment. There's a whole Tango project in the Spanish Wikipedia, so I guess more improvements on the subject will come in the long term. CARMENFACET (talk) 22:53, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

, yes -- each language edition of Wikipedia is, basically, a separate publication. They all have a shared origin and shared values, but a lot of the policies and processes vary. Sometimes an article is translated, but more often, it has been written by different people for different language editions. So, WikiData basically exists to tie together similar articles -- not translations of articles. Hope that makes sense!

-- pinging you as well, since you've expressed interest! -Pete (talk) 16:48, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Badges
At the END of the course, IF we successfully complete the six-week course, we earn the Burba badge. How will we show that on our userpages?

The WIKISOO Badges page ALSO shows a WikiSOO Signator Badge, which some of us have already earned (I know that, by the terms shown on that page, I have earned that badge and would like to show it). How could I make that appear on my userpage?


 * Wikipedia Service Awards


 * Hi @Maynard, first -- remember to sign your posts with four tildes ( ~ ). (I was able to track down who asked this question in the page history).


 * You can see how Litjade, a former (and current!) student, has her badge displayed on her user page. (You can also choose to display it elsewhere using the Mozilla Backpack system -- here's my own badge, for example.)


 * Our intent has been to award the badges at the conclusion of the course. Unlike the Wikipedia Service Awards they are based on, our badges are designed to be awarded by the course instructors (or perhaps in the future, but people who have earned the badge themselves). They are a hybrid between Wikipedia Service Awards and Mozilla Open Badges. You're right, you have certainly fulfilled the WIKISOO Signator Badge requirements -- as have many others!


 * If students are interested, now that we have completed three class sessions, I don't see any reason we couldn't take submissions so you can put these on your user pages. I will post submission instructions shortly. -Pete (talk) 00:40, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

I've been trying to apply for the Wikisoo Signator Badge using the P2PU page Pete created, but it won't accept my application. Is there a different way to apply? Camellia wagashi (talk) 04:05, 26 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Camellia wagashi, thanks for letting us know! What kind of error do you get? Has anyone else had this problem? - Sara FB (talk) 23:32, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Enjoying the course: Blogpost
As per the Homework to post here if we've been writing about the course elsewhere, here's a link to a short blog about three of the features on WP that I've been using since learning about them: http://www.taureshimp.com/?p=67 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Graphemie (talk • contribs) 04:51, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , thank you for reflecting on the course on your blog! It is really helpful for us to learn what is interesting and useful for you -- I appreciate knowing that talk pages, Wikimedia Commons, and the Manual of Style were standout learning points for you.
 * One small quibble -- do you think you could link to the course's main page when you first mention it? WP:WIKISOO is the best link.
 * Thanks! -Pete (talk) 16:14, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Great point! Added the link in. Thanks :) Graphemie (talk) 05:47, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

New final project on nuclear labor issues
I've started working in one of my sandboxes on a new article on nuclear labor issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netherzone/sandbox_Nuclear_Labor_Issues

I have a lot more citations, and links, and a larger bibliography I've not yet uploaded on this subject. What I seek help with is insuring that a Neutral Tone is used in the written text portions of the page (soon to come). At this time there is just an introductory paragraph, basic contents, and a slew o' links and future citations. This article will take probably longer than the remaining weeks of the class, but any and all input or comments are welcome - especially those that can help guide and mentor me to cultivate a neutral article addressing the history and health and safety issues. Netherzone (talk) 02:43, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , this looks like a fantastic start. I would encourage you to think about publishing it to "article space" even before you consider it "done" -- you might (or might not) find that others are interested in helping you build it. That can sometimes be a frustrating experience (because others will want to take it in a different direction than you have in mind); it can also sometimes be a beautiful experience (because others will bring ideas, perspectives, and maybe source material that are unexpected, illuminating, and exciting to explore). Regardless of which you encounter, it would be a very Wikipedia experience :) (It's also entirely possible that nobody would do anything substantial with the article -- that's normal too.)
 * The choice is yours, of course; if you prefer to just keep it in your sandbox while you work on it, that's fine. But if you take that path, it's possible that you could put a whole lot of work into it, only to find later that there are substantial disagreements with other Wikipedians, and your article won't survive in the form you originally planned. This is one of the main advantages to working in article space, once you've got a basically viable stub; by surfacing points of disagreement earlier on, you can surface any possible disagreements earlier, and work through them sooner. -Pete (talk) 23:40, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * @Pete Yikes! Ok, will take your sage advise, and be bold and put it out there, warts and all. I'm not even sure if I'm ping'ing correctly! Well, here goes... :-) Netherzone (talk) 00:28, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * You had a mix of square [ and "curly" { brackets -- it's OK though, I spotted it anyway, and fixed :) Good luck, I'll keep an eye on it! -Pete (talk) 05:59, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I just copy-and-pasted the text back into your sandbox page: User:Netherzone/sandbox Nuclear Labor Issues I did this because I do think it's likely that (sooner or later) others might make substantial changes to your article. Some of these will be merely technical; it's unusual to have empty sections, or notes like "TEXT TO COME," in an actual published article. There might also be more substantive critiques. This way, you will have easy access, for your own reference to the early draft you did, for as long as you want to keep it ; nobody's going to mess with the version in your sandbox. I hope this helps. Eager to see where you go with this! -Pete (talk) 06:10, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Blogpost on WIKISOO
Here is my blog post[]for homework5.

Minikaramchedu (talk) 15:10, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Much appreciated! It's great to know what has been helpful to you in the course. -Pete (talk) 23:22, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Homework Week 5
I have thoroughly enjoyed this course. To start closing things out and to finish the week 5 homework here is a short blog post I put together highlighting some takeaways from this course. http://www.ryanguy.org/?p=511 Ryanx7 (talk) 19:13, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * thank you for a great writeup! Wonderful to have this feedback. -Pete (talk) 23:21, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * great work Ryan your post inspired me to write my own. Minikaramchedu (talk) 00:53, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Someone is wrong on the Internet
Is there any process/arbitration involved regarding two people on an article's Talk page that disagree over whether a section should be included in the article or not? Averting reverting each other's contributions, basically. Any formal metric of who has more cited source support for his/her case for example, as mentioned in one or two classes? DavidBoudreau (talk) 02:16, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you are making reference to this XKCD comic, which I hope all our students have seen :) There is an overview of the various methods for resolving a dispute here: WP:DISPUTE In short, there is no single best answer; but the best general approach is to consider the situation in relation to Wikipedia's policies (especially the five pillars), make your arguments accordingly, and gradually reach out to more people to join the discussion. Usually the best first step is to find a relevant WikiProject, summarize the discussion, and invite members to come talk about it on the article's talk page. -Pete (talk) 16:28, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you, I will try those. It's good to know there are lots of things to try before requesting formal arbitration.  I certainly don't want to jump to something like that if it can be avoided.  (It didn't affect my final project, fortunately.)  And yes, I was referencing the XKCD comic- thanks for helping with the attribution! DavidBoudreau (talk) 03:11, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

THANKS
Pete and Sara many thanks for letting me know more about Wikipedia. I've found out that it is really a nice/interesting and enthusiastic community. I am too newbie so I will take some time to digest all the info received and will take this course again sometime in the future to present a proper final project. Thanks for your attention and interest in all your students. I'll keep in touch. CARMENFACET (talk) 21:43, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * @CARMENFACET, thank you! But are you sure about the Burba Badge? Please apply for the Signator Badge anyway! You're eligible, or can be quite easily... - Sara FB (talk) 19:55, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Translation
Hi everyone! I just came to tell you that I start the translation of the article that I wrote for the course. This is the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Luisalvaz/sandbox

Thanks! --Luisalvaz (talk) 05:52, 3 April 2014 (UTC) Luis, I’ll be happy to proofread the translation for you once you have finished and are ready to move the article into the Article space. I can read Spanish and I’m a native English speaker. Let me know when you’re ready to have me look at it! —giso6150 (talk) 13:17, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Awesome news Luisalvaz and giso6150! Keep up the good work. :) - Sara FB (talk) 19:58, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

My blog entry on WIKISOO the LOOC
OK, here's my blog entry in My Day at UK about WIKISOO - take a look! Taking a Little Open Online Course (LOOC) in Wikipedia Randolph.hollingsworth (talk) 19:10, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
 * That's great @Randolph.hollingsworth! Collegial is a great word for it. :) The Open educational resources policy article is one of my pet projects and I'm totally delighted you're working on it. Keep it up - we're delighted to have you around! - Sara FB (talk) 20:05, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Homework-old school blog
Since blogging is a little further down on my to-do list, I have been spreading the word via individual conversations with friends and coworkers. As a topic of interest comes up in a conversation, I jump on it and turn the discussion into what might be on Wikipedia about it. From there it's an easy step to discussing my experiences with this course, sharing some of the basic info I've learned, and encouraging them to add their knowledge to the page(s) in question. So far I've found a collaborator for my project article who possesses some of the source material, a nephew who is thrilled at the prospect of reviewing and adding articles on his areas of interest, and a coworker who is wanting to share more information on a specific condition of an offspring. While it blogposts potentially reach a larger audience and increase the chances of catching someone's interest, for now I'm content with my individualized approach. EternaLearner (talk) 01:14, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * @EternaLearner, that's great! Lots of after-the-fact extra credit for you! ;) Are they getting into editing? - Sara FB (talk) 20:11, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

OER14
User:MartinPoulter and I (Sjgknight) are going to be at OER14 (Open Educational Resources 14) in Newcastle next month on behalf of Wikimedia UK. I'm giving a quick talk on Analysing learning using Mediawiki and Martin's giving one on the Wikimedia ecosystem, we're also running a fringe event on editing Wikipedia a sort of editathon I guess. Anyway it crossed my mind that people here might have suggestions for good articles to encourage people to have a look at there and then, and also whether any of the attendees (list of talks here) either should have, or actually do have, Wikipedia articles (e.g. I know Mike Sharples does) - if so, getting media (photos, etc) might be possible. Sjgknight (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 17:48, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * @Sjgknight, thanks for the note. I'll be there too! I'll message you offline. Our working list of OER articles needing attention is under the OER tab above, and Pete and I are talking specifics right now, so the timing is good. About how many did you have in mind? As for individuals of interest I'll look over the attendee list and let you know my own thoughts... Thanks for pinging us on this! - Sara FB (talk) 20:16, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

WikiSOO Signator Badge
Hi Pete! Just let you know that I have submitted for the WikiSOO Signator Badge and didn't get any feedback yet. Up to now we are six who have submitted for WikiSOO Signator Badge. Take Care! :) Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 00:43, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks @Marie-Pierre St-Louis - your badge has now been awarded! Congratulations and thanks for the timely submission. All can admire Marie-Pierre's work here. Hoorah! - Sara FB (talk) 19:54, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Sara! Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 15:59, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Images and photos
I joined this course specifically to learn more about contributing images. I uploaded a picture and had permission to use it. It got deleted and I communicated with the person who deleted it. At that time I was rather busy and did not have time to deal with it. As I am in Europe at the moment I cannot join the sessions at a reasonable time. I saw that there are others who also have this problem. What can I do in the future. I would appreciate feedback. Thank you --Nadia El Borai (talk) 15:51, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi @Nadia El Borai - sorry to hear you've had trouble. I think you'll find some detailed replies above, as well as in the video archive of class discussions... have you tried watching any of those? The answer will rely on your personal circumstances. This may help too... Requesting_copyright_permission - Sara FB (talk) 19:17, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Sara, I will look up the links you mention and hopefully will be able to sort out what I have been doing wrong, and manage to contribute more.--Nadia El Borai (talk) 19:49, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

User photo an reply to feedback in p2pu badges Web site
How can I add a photo of me for my p2pu badges user? How can I reply to Sara's feedback? Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 16:04, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
 * @Marie-Pierre St-Louis, I've been trying to figure out the photo issue myself and it remains a mystery! I think I created my account at P2PU itself first, THEN the badge account - perhaps try that? Since it is a third party perhaps we need to contact them directly with this question if that doesn't work. RE feedback, please reply in any forum you prefer, e.g. on this page, on my talk page, or in a private message if you prefer (Tools>>Email this user). I hope that helps! - Sara FB (talk) 19:19, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Article Ready for Review
Hi Pete and Sara: My article on Open Course Library (OCL) -- written from scratch -- is just about done and rests in my sandbox -- I have more references to add -- and I'll do that over the next couple of days. Would you please take a look and tell me what to do now? If it's ready, how do I move it out into the "real" world? -- although I notice that it is already indexed by Google. I, of course, would like to get all the badges I can out of this too. Thanks very muchResearcherguy (talk) 12:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello! I am interested in libraries in Washington so I cleaned up your article a bit. I posted some comments on the discussion page for the article but as it is, it is ready to go live or at least be queued for review at articles for creation. I think it is good as it is.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  13:24, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * @Researcherguy, If  Blue Rasberry   says it's ready, it's ready! I didn't see this note so continued to reply to the one to me and Pete on my talk page. Anyway, can you join us for the the reunion tomorrow to review how to move an article into article space? Or, if feeling bold, check out the instructions here. BTW, please invoke our usernames as BlueR and I have done here to alert us that you've left us a note! :) - Sara FB (talk) 19:14, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi Sara: I probably will be unable to attend. I'll put it up and let you know. I'll be back in touch. ThanksResearcherguy (talk)

Sara: I put it upResearcherguy (talk) 19:17, 15 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Very happy for you! This is a great addition to the OER article list (click tab above). To answer your question about "invoking" other users, I refer you to this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Reply_to
 * In the same way that four tildes turns into your name/signature, if you "link" to a username that user is alerted that they have been mentioned somewhere. Otherwise they might miss your message. you can copy and paste the text like Sara FB from the code, OR use any of the templates at that URL (some insert a @ for you - details are spelled out). I hope I explained that well! - Sara FB (talk) 22:35, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

@Sara FB Thanks -- you were a great help. Also, I found the page on how to submit for badges. Researcherguy (talk) 22:42, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Need help on 'Outline of open education' article
Hey there to @User:Peteforsyth, @User:Snarfa and classmates! I'd really appreciate any comments, advice, suggestions and help on Outline of open education. It's an unassessed article, and at some point the designation should be changed to list-class. For the structure I tried to adapt what I learned from WP:Outline. For populating the outline I've drawn heavily from WP:COMMOER, WP:WikiProject_Open/OER and the class notes left on the article's talk page. —Litjade (talk) 01:59, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Litjade, this is really exciting! I think it's really important article and encourage others to join in this chat. Sorry I haven't had a chance to look at this article myself - things are a little hectic here right now. I'll try my best to look at it soon and hope User:Peteforsyth gets there first ;) - Sara FB (talk) 23:04, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

My apologize
Sorry guys, I wasn't able to join in the reunion of today. But I hope we can stay in touch through Wiki and twitter. Greetings all. --Luisalvaz (talk) 04:23, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep in touch @Luisalvaz and join us for the next one! - Sara FB (talk) 18:28, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to Participate in a User Study - Final Reminder
Would you be interested in participating in a user study of a new tool to support editor involvement in WikiProjects? We are a team at the University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within WikiProjects, and we are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visual exploration tool for Wikipedia. Given your interest in this Wikiproject, we would welcome your participation in our study. To participate, you will be given access to our new visualization tool and will interact with us via Google Hangout so that we can solicit your thoughts about the tool. To use Google Hangout, you will need a laptop/desktop, a web camera, and a speaker for video communication during the study. We will provide you with an Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 15:58, 21 April 2014 (UTC).

NYT article about Adrianne
At the WikiSOO class reunion, April 15th, @Pete mentioned the tragic loss of Adrianne Wadewitz. The New York Times carried an inspiring piece about her on April 19th, mentioning her contributions to many FA articles here. My heartfelt condolences to all who knew her. —Litjade (talk) 22:58, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Final Project, new article : Shutter Island (graphic novel)
Hi Sara and Pete! I'm about to finish my final project. It's a new article about Shutter Island (graphic novel). I think I already meet the criteria for the final project. What do you think? Can I sumbmit it for the final projet? How this article can receive a class? Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 08:58, 11 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Marie-Pierre, sorry to miss this. From a very quick look, I can tell you have put a great deal of effort into this -- impressive. I think the ratio of text to references is a little low; the "plot" section is rather long, and not sourced. Are there any reviews that have summarized the plot, that you can summarize and cite? You may need to put in a little more work -- but this is definitely a strong start! -Pete (talk) 22:49, 15 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your recommendations. I have followed these and, since I have more than 200 edits, I applied for the WikiSOO Burba Badge! Marie-Pierre St-Louis (talk) 17:27, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Improving WP:Open home page
I was just going to make the "Collaboration of the Week" template smaller since it takes up so much screen space, when I realized it leads to a link with no real content! Any objection to sidelining this until the concept takes off (@Pete?) I would also like to see some things related to OER balancing the "Open Access" banners dominating the home page. What OER-related materials can we create to supplement these? Feedback from all is welcome and encouraged, especially those with experience in other WikiProjects! - Sara FB (talk) 20:17, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, there's the catch-22 – unless the Collaboration of the Week is prominently on the homepage, it will definitely never take off! I did try to update it but got discouraged when it didn't lead to much activity. Absolutely would be happy for more OER stuff on the home page, looking forward to seeing what people suggest. - Lawsonstu (talk) 08:50, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah! Thanks Lawsonstu. In my copious free time I'm thinking about spending some time on other WikiProject pages poring for ideas... but this probably won't happen till after OER14... boo. - Sara FB (talk) 18:59, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm a gal of my word! NEW COTW in progress! -Sara FB (talk) 18:08, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

New Collab of the Week articles!
I added two new collaboration of the week articles! (See WP:Open home page, orange box, for more info.) Something is wrong with the WAS template but I'll check it out in a bit. Thanks to @Lawsonstu and @Pete for the inspiration. Let's do this thing! - Sara FB (talk) 18:22, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Requests for comment/How to deal with open datasets
There is a discussion at Requests for comment/How to deal with open datasets on meta-wiki with the following goal:

"This community consultation has the goal to determine what is the stance of the community regarding the recent surge of open data, what should be its relationship with our projects, and gather proposals to handle these open data sets more efficiently in order to benefit editors, readers, and enable potential partnerships."

- Lawsonstu (talk) 17:56, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

ORCID
Those of you interested in open access may be interested in ORCID. ORCID is an open system of identifiers for people - particularly researchers and the authors of academic papers; but also contributors to other works, not least Wikipedia editors. ORCIDs are a bit like ISBNs for books or DOIs for papers. You can register for one, free, at http://orcid.org As well as including your ORCID in any works to which you contribute, you can include it in your user page using Authority control thus:  (that template can also include other identifies, such as VIAF and LCCN - there's an example on my user page). ORCID identifiers can also be added to biographical articles, either directly or via Wikidata. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:28, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikiproject Open Booklet at Wikimania
Looking for new recruits for your Wikiproject? Check this out: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Booklets

EdSaperia (talk) 05:55, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
 * @EdSaperia Wow! Any catch? Looks like a great way to spread the word. :) - Sara FB (talk) 01:25, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
 * No catch, but no guarantee. If the budget falls short, this won't happen - but I hope we'll be able to do this. EdSaperia (talk) 17:28, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I've added WikiProject open to the leaflets page (https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_Leaflets#WikiProject_Open) but it needs a bit more information filling in. Also, the logo: do we want to design one? - Lawsonstu (talk) 08:44, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not sure. I am worried about the copy and asking for a particular response from readers for all of these. I am not sure what the format should be, either. Postcards? Posters? An actual booklet as described?
 * When this is sorted for any one of these then it could be further developed for the rest of them.
 * As for logo, I favor using the orange lock to express the concept of "open" even though that just is intended for use for open access. I would like to position open access as the center of all other concepts in the open movement, despite earlier stronger movements in things like free and open source software.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  13:24, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The longer description for the project still needs completing, I'll get round to it eventually but if anyone else has the time, go ahead! - Lawsonstu (talk) 07:21, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Merge "Open Learning" with "Open Education" article, or clarify differences further?
"Open learning" is a common term for "open education" so the former is a rather problematic article IMO - does anyone have thoughts about how best to address this issue? (Apparently the term "open learning" has long been used by Montessori et al., just need to make the connections/differences clear in practice. @Pete, ideas? All feedback welcome. Leaving a note on the open learning page too, and @Litjade is mentioning at WikiProject Education, but I suggest we discuss it here. - Sara FB (talk) 21:19, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Merge discussions should happen on the talk page of one of those articles (preferably the intended merge target) and not here. czar ♔  21:54, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you @Czar! - Sara FB (talk) 19:27, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I've open this topic for discussion on the Open education talk page—Litjade (talk) 13:29, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Barnraising 19 July
Hi all - you may have heard about the upcoming "Wikipedia Barnraising" event (#OERBARN) on Saturday July 19th, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time, at the Oakland Impact Hub (2323 Broadway, Oakland, California) -- and online! Lunch and refreshments will be provided for those joining us in person. WikiProject Open is one of many ways in which members of the Open Education community have worked to strengthen Wikipedia's coverage of Open Educational Resources and related topics. Pete and I are among those hosting this event as an extension of that work, and as a follow-on to our "Writing Wikipedia Articles" (WIKISOO) class -- we sincerely hope you can join us. We welcome online participants from around the world (and we have a few tricks up our sleeves to help everyone work together smoothly). Please register here if you can attend either virtually or in person. More info is available at WP:OERBARN. We look forward to seeing you, online or in person, and to raising a wiki barn with you! - Sara FB (talk) 23:20, 1 July 2014 (UTC) (with a little help from Pete!)

Jesmion's talk
Hi, am Jesmion, i wish to express my profound gratitudes for the on-going process about open, openness, openaccess and openeducation, but how do we respect personalty of open? i have a special regards for my insructor Pete-Forsyth for his wide experiences about openness, even some administators are yet to be educated in course of openness, am Jesmion, my accessibility to study at p2pu had been blocked and account deleted for a minor cause, i mean our administrators should be tolerants, and stop showing pomposity to the junior class, so that they can be among the open-education, but for yesterday they were blocked-eduction and today they can be open-education, am Jesmion, 105.112.8.6 (talk) 08:05, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello ! It looks like the problem was your using multiple accounts. You can be unblocked by copying this text

To your userpage and by typing your reason for wanting to be unblocked where it says "your reason here". A good reason for wanting to be unblocked would be your stating that you intend to just use one Wikipedia account, and that you understand there is a rule against having multiple accounts. Thanks for posting!  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  13:56, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

WP:Open and WP:Open Access
Why are they two different projects? What is the difference in scope? I notice they both share this talk page.-- Brainy J  ~ ✿ ~ ( talk ) 20:18, 14 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi Brainy J, WikiProject Open Access came first, and the scope of it is restricted to open access to research and open access academic publishing. WikiProject Open was created last year as an umbrella project, encompassing WikiProject Open Access, Communicate OER, and any other related WikiProjects that want to join. The talk page for WikiProject Open Access—and any other projects included under this umbrella project—redirect to the talk page of WikiProject Open, so that all discussions happen on the same page and people can see what work is going on in related open movements. Let me know if that's made it clearer! - Lawsonstu (talk) 19:43, 15 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I was also confused about their relation the first few times I looked at WP:OPEN. It might help if WP:OPEN had a logo that wasn't so similar to the OA logo, and if the WP:OPEN home page didn't have a join tab and a join button, one for WP:OPEN, one for WP:OPENACCESS. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 17:54, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Tiers of OER articles and WikiProject Open importance assessments
I wonder if the tiers of articles listed on WikiProject_Open/OER should be reconciled with/maintained going forward as WikiProject Open importance assessments? If reconciliation is impossible -- effectively a separate OER assessment is warranted -- one way to still maintain going forward as assessments would be to add an OER sub-assessment, like the SF Bay Area Task Force has a sub-assessment to WikiProject California's. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 02:43, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Main page reformat proposal
I'd like to propose a reformatting of the front page to bring the purpose of the WikiProject to the top. I believe visitors to the site have a hard time understanding both what a WikiProject is, and what THIS WikiProject is, when confronted by so many tabs and boxes instead simple text explaining the concept. I propose moving explanatory text to reside just under the tabs, so it is visible without any scrolling activity required. See for example WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Military History. Do others have reactions or feedback? - Sara FB (talk) 01:42, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It has long been a problem on Wikipedia that there are not WikiProject templates or best practices for making a page. This project, along with Military History and Medicine, have had some of the most work put into their development and design of any projects on Wikipedia, and all of them are found to be confusing to users. You could change this project to be more like those other two, but you may find a problematic outcome there as well.
 * At meta:Grants:IdeaLab/WikiProject management suite I proposed that some ought to apply for funding to help establish best practices in creating WikiProject spaces. This is a big project. I confirm that no one has taken it on before. Someone ought to, and they ought to apply for funding to do it.
 * Until that happens, Safa FB, I support your trying to do whatever you want to do, and hope you have better luck than the others before you.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  14:07, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Oy, thanks, for the support and the warnings! Maybe I'll put a proposed draft revision in my sandbox and ask for some feedback. And any/all other specific ideas welcome... - Sara FB (talk) 19:55, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I like WikiProject Medicine because it avoids secondary tabs which are unavoidably ugly, I like long pages, and I like assessments on project home page as those are a great guide to what to read and what to edit. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 18:13, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The hopes for the WikiProject Medicine page have included it being a way to get people who visit it to ask questions on the talk page if they have trouble in medical topics and also as a portal to recruit people to tend to the queues of medical tasks. Both of those seem like reasonable goals, but still, it seems that few new people will comment on the talk page and few experienced users actually find the page useful as an operations hub. The page went through a major redesign about a year ago. I like the new look as does everyone else, but eventually we need proper review by someone who does design. And again - this is not just a medicine problem, but a problem with the interface of each of the hundreds of WikiProjects. This format was arbitrarily put together because it is easy to render in the software, and people have gone with it without ever considering if it was as good for users as it was easy for designers to present. It might be good enough but I am not sure, and I would not even know how to critique it.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  19:22, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for all that background. I'm definitely not holding up the WikiProject Medicine home page as an ideal, just a direction that would be an improvement for the WikiProject Open home page, IMO. I hope your idea for a meta:Grants:IdeaLab/WikiProject management suite gets taken up by someone! Mike Linksvayer (talk) 20:34, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Proposing a single update for now, @, @ et al.: Perhaps we could make the "tasks" section of this WikiProject main page into a tab, so that the main page can be devoted to explaining what the project is. "Tasks" can include both the materials included here and a list of articles for improvement, so people go there in search of what to do, and how to do it. This can link to a separate page devoted to storing the "bibliography" compiled under CommOER, which focuses on OER only (a list which will be significant enhanced by the end of this month. Just a brainstorm to get things moving. Reactions? - Sara FB (talk) 13:13, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Adding OER-focused publications to Communicate OER Resources page
The list of OER-focused resources started for Communicate OER is now being built up and organized to collect data gathered over the course of the project! If you know of particularly good references that can, or should, be cited in articles about OER, please add them to the list here under the appropriate category - or help us structure the page. Open Access resources are strongly encouraged but all resources are welcome! We can use these for the Wiki Barn raising on July 19 (please register here!) but will also preserve them for posterity. Thanks for all support. - Sara FB (talk) 17:44, 4 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Is anyone aware of WikiProjects that have reference lists like this, to which we can aspire, and perhaps whose model we can use? - Sara FB (talk) 16:17, 7 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd also love to see a useful example from another project. To avoid becoming an unwieldy link dump I wonder if it could be more intensely focused on resources for citation? Maybe even restarted under WP:OPEN and called "bibliography" rather than resources. The most useful, er, resources, ought be external links on Open educational resources, which currently has a few random ones. I noticed a different conception of resources at WikiProject_Feminism/Resources. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 18:28, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * WikiProject_Open_Access/Resources is a bit more bibliography-like. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 18:57, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * If you hear of anyone using WikiProject_Open_Access/Resources then having them remove resources which are less good may even be more useful than adding more resources. There is a real need just to define the most fundamental concepts on Wikipedia and that has proven a lot harder than I ever would have anticipated, just because at least a few years ago finding sources which talk generally was so difficult. I am sure the landscape has changed since then.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  19:07, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Communicate OER is being "mothballed" after July 2014 and all content, including resources/bibliography, will reside here. Is there an obvious place to place our reference list (i.e. resources/biblography-in-progress) which focuses on pieces ABOUT OER)? - Sara FB (talk) 23:41, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * How about WikiProject Open/OER/Bibliography? Or /Resources? We could migrate and improve at or in preparation for the barnraising. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 02:22, 11 July 2014 (UTC)


 * @ I like the proposed location! See my related note above. For the moment we would ideally have such content mirrored at CommOER until we decide how to "store" any CommOER info (reviewing those project pages is probably part of the final project review process, which will be done in 2014), but building the content here in WP:Open going forward sounds ideal to this girl right here. @, ideas?- Sara FB (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Restructured planning page
I subtly restructured the planning page for this project (which had a stream-of-consciousness feel to it) in anticipation of renewed work as an outcome of the Barn Raising July 19, where we will encourage individuals with an interest in the principles of openness to engage with the project and think about possible future tasks. It looks like the ideas and notes from the early meetings got mixed in with the call logistics. Looking to the future, preserving those excellent ideas may be desirable. This could include pulling some ideas to the main project page to clarify its purpose. Very welcome to further restructuring/feedback! And I encourage anyone interested in editing articles from the OER tab to engage with the Barn Raising, online or in person... register here. (FREE LUNCH!) - Sara FB (talk) 17:44, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Preliminary (tiny) report from WP:OERBARN
We're nearing the end of our "Barn Raising" event, to improve articles related to OER -- see here: WP:OERBARN We'll report back in greater detail, but for the moment, here are a few things we got done today: Thanks to everybody who participated -- we hope to see you here on WikiProject Open in the future! -Pete (talk) 21:59, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Started Open High School of Utah (and then moved it to its new name)
 * Renamed Outline of open education to better reflect its contents
 * Created Open educational resources category for articles
 * Added WikiProject Open tags to a few articles
 * Added new references, and formatted existing ones
 * Improvements to open access, MOOC, and a number of other articles

Wikiproject open access listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikiproject open access. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Mattsenate (talk) 15:15, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi, I'm not seeing that entry at either of the links -- has this been resolved already? -Pete (talk) 21:45, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Strange, I see. It may have been resolved already. I simply stumbled on this link by accident and wanted to note it, so I added the template as instructed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiproject_open_access. Mattsenate (talk) 09:12, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there a problem with Wikiproject open access redirecting to WikiProject Open Access, because it is pointing to a different namespace? - Lawsonstu (talk) 14:16, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Open bibliographic and citation data in Wikidata
Following a lot of discussion over the last few weeks, particularly at Wikimania, a new WikiProject has been created on Wikidata: WikiProject Source MetaData. Among other things, this WikiProject aims to create Wikidata entries for as many academic articles as possible. This open citation data will feed many other projects, such as Signalling OA-ness and the Open Access Reader - Lawsonstu (talk) 18:31, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

License compliance issues with Template:OA-attribution
Hi. :) I've stumbled upon what I believe is a serious potential license issue with Template:OA-attribution that I believe needs to be handled. I've opened a discussion at Template talk:OA-attribution and would appreciate some input. Thanks! --Moonriddengirl (talk) 10:51, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject Academia?
Hi. I see that a lot here deals with academic publishing in general, not necessarily OA. I thought you might be interested in WikiProject Council/Proposals/Academia. Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 21:27, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Help review an interesting paper
As I noted at User_talk:Tbayer_(WMF), there is an interesting paper (Public Domain Rank: Identifying Notable Individuals with the Wisdom of the Crowd)that can be reviewed in more detail in the upcoming November issue Wikimedia Research Newsletter (co-published with Signpost) that I think is of significant interest to librarians and digitization/open access/public domain activists. Perhaps someone would be interested in building upon my abstract-like review and providing a few more thoughts? Feel free to post on TB's page with an updated review, modify my own or add a new one. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:49, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Launch of WikiProject Wikidata for research
Hi, this is to let you know that we've launched WikiProject Wikidata for research in order to stimulate a closer interaction between Wikidata and research, both on a technical and a community level. As a first activity, we are drafting a research proposal on the matter (cf. blog post). Your thoughts on and contributions to that would be most welcome! Thanks, -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 02:15, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

New guide on CC-licenses
A guide on Creative Commons licenses was recently published by Wikimedia Deutschland and partners.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  16:25, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Category:Open access publishers
Pls see: Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_January_8. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:31, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Non-diffusing subcategory of category open access journals
Pls see Category_talk:Creative_Commons-licensed_journals. Thx. Fgnievinski (talk) 06:30, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Deletion of List of open access projects
Pls see Articles for deletion/List of open access projects. Thx. Fgnievinski (talk) 06:31, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!


Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 1
Hi! Thank you for subscribing to the WikiProject X Newsletter. For our first issue...

'''Has WikiProject X changed the world yet? No.'''

We opened up shop last month and announced our existence to the world. Our first phase is the "research" phase, consisting mostly of reading and listening. We set up our landing page and started collecting stories. So far, 28 stories have been shared about WikiProjects, describing a variety of experiences across numerous WikiProjects. A recurring story involves a WikiProject that starts off strong but has trouble continuing to stay active. Most people describe using WikiProjects as a way to get feedback from other editors. Some quotes:
 * "Working on requested articles, utilising the reliable sources section, and having an active WikiProject to ask questions in really helped me learn how to edit Wikipedia and looking back I don't know how long I would have stayed editing without that project." – Sam Walton on WikiProject Video Games
 * "I believe that the main problem of the Wikiprojects is that they are complicated to use. There should be a a much simpler way to check what do do, what needs to be improved etc." – Tetra quark
 * "In the late 2000s, WikiProject Film tried to emulate WP:MILHIST in having coordinators and elections. Unfortunately, this was not sustainable and ultimately fell apart." – Erik

Of course, these are just anecdotes. While they demonstrate what is possible, they do not necessarily explain what is typical. We will be using this information in conjunction with a quantitative analysis of WikiProjects, as documented on Meta. Particularly, we are interested in the measurement of WikiProject activity as it relates to overall editing in that WikiProject's subject area.

We also have 50 people and projects signed up for pilot testing, which is an excellent start! (An important caveat: one person volunteering a WikiProject does not mean the WikiProject as a whole is interested; just that there is at least one person, which is a start.)

While carrying out our research, we are documenting the problems with WikiProjects and our ideas for making WikiProjects better. Some ideas include better integration of existing tools into WikiProjects, recommendations of WikiProjects for people to join, and improved coordination with Articles for Creation. These are just ideas that may or may not make it to the design phase; we will see. We are also working with WikiProject Council to improve the directory of WikiProjects, with the goal of a reliable, self-updating WikiProject directory. Stay tuned! If you have any ideas, you are welcome to leave a note on our talk page.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing!

– Harej 17:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation's open access policy
The Wikimedia Foundation now requests compliance with an open access policy for partnerships in research.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  21:32, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Makes sense to me. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:58, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2
For this month's issue...

Making sense of a lot of data.

Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.

We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.

We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.

Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.

As a couple of asides...


 * Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
 * WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.

Harej (talk) 01:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I find these tools useful. Haven't had a chance to run ProjAnalysis yet but looked at its code and documentation as well as at WikiProjects by Changes, which tracks over 2k WikiProjects and has WP:OPENACCESS ranked 81 by count of non-bot edits (a total of 498 over 365 days). -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 01:11, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Welcome OER2015 participants
If you're landing on this page for the first time as part of - or following - the Hewlett grantee's meeting, welcome! Feel free to post comments here about editing OER articles or any articles about openness. And feel free to contact me directly if you want to get started with editing these articles and just don't know how.... - Sara FB (talk) 17:07, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Learn to edit Wikipedia articles on OER with self-paced WIKISOO course
We posted all the course materials and videos from one round of the Communicate OER project online class - the self-paced version of the WIKISOO Writing Wikipedia Articles course. Ready for the Deep Dive? You can work through these on your own! Feel free to contact me with any questions. - Sara FB (talk) 17:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

New political party article
I can't find your assessment criteria. (Should they be transcluded to your home page?) However, I think Something New (political party), a British org with an open source manifesto, might be in the scope of your project, so I just tagged its talk page with an assessment request. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 18:32, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Reddit Science AMA + PLOS + Wikipedia
At WikiProject Medicine I summarized a proposal I made at [[:meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Reddit Science AMA + PLOS + Wikipedia about a potential partnership between Reddit Science AMA + PLOS + Wikipedia. More details are at either of those places. Because of the PLOS connection I thought I should post here.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  16:07, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 3
Greetings! For this month's issue...

We have demos!

After a lengthy research and design process, we decided for WikiProject X to focus on two things:
 * A WikiProject workflow that focuses on action items: discussions you can participate in and tasks you can perform to improve the encyclopedia; and
 * An automatically updating WikiProject directory that gives you lists of users participating in the WikiProject and editing in that subject area.

We have a live demonstration of the new WikiProject workflow at WikiProject Women in Technology, a brand new WikiProject that was set up as an adjunct to a related edit-a-thon in Washington, DC. The goal is to surface action items for editors, and we intend on doing that through automatically updated working lists. We are looking into using SuggestBot to generate lists of outstanding tasks, and we are looking into additional options for automatic worklist generation. This takes the burden off of WikiProject editors to generate these worklists, though there is also a "requests" section for Wikipedians to make individual requests. (As of writing, these automated lists are not yet live, so you will see a blank space under "edit articles" on the demo WikiProject. Sorry about that!) I invite you to check out the WikiProject and leave feedback on WikiProject X's talk page.

Once the demo is sufficiently developed, we will be working on a limited deployment on our pilot WikiProjects. We have selected five for the first round of testing based on the highest potential for impact and will scale up from there.

While a re-designed WikiProject experience is much needed, that alone isn't enough. A WikiProject isn't any good if people have no way of discovering it. This is why we are also developing an automatically updated WikiProject directory. This directory will surface project-related metrics, including a count of active WikiProject participants and of active editors in that project's subject area. The purpose of these metrics is to highlight how active the WikiProject is at the given point of time, but also to highlight that project's potential for success. The directory is not yet live but there is a demonstration featuring a sampling of WikiProjects.

Each directory entry will link to a WikiProject description page which automatically list the active WikiProject participants and subject-area article editors. This allows Wikipedians to find each other based on the areas they are interested in, and this information can be used to revive a WikiProject, start a new one, or even for some other purpose. These description pages are not online yet, but they will use this template, if you want to get a feel of what they will look like.

We need volunteers!

WikiProject X is a huge undertaking, and we need volunteers to support our efforts, including testers and coders. Check out our volunteer portal and see what you can do to help us!

As an aside...

Wouldn't it be cool if lists of requested articles could not only be integrated directly with WikiProjects, but also shared between WikiProjects? Well, we got the crazy idea of having experimental software feature Flow deployed (on a totally experimental basis) on the new Article Request Workshop, which seeks to be a place where editors can "workshop" article ideas before they get created. It uses Flow because Flow allows, essentially, section-level categorization, and in the future will allow "sections" (known as "topics" within Flow) to be included across different pages. What this means is that you have a recommendation for a new article tagged by multiple WikiProjects, allowing for the recommendation to appear on lists for each WikiProject. This will facilitate inter-WikiProject collaboration and will help to reduce duplicated work. The Article Request Workshop is not entirely ready yet due to some bugs with Flow, but we hope to integrate it into our pilot WikiProjects at some point.

Harej (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4
Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?


 * A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
 * A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
 * New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
 * SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
 * Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.

Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Copyright Violation Detection - EranBot Project
A new copy-paste detection bot is now in general use on English Wikipedia. Come check it out at the EranBot reporting page. This bot utilizes the Turnitin software (ithenticate), unlike User:CorenSearchBot that relies on a web search API from Yahoo. It checks individual edits rather than just new articles. Please take 15 seconds to visit the EranBot reporting page and check a few of the flagged concerns. Comments welcome regarding potential improvements. These likely copyright violations can be searched by WikiProject categories. Use "control-f" to jump to your area of interest (if such a copyvio is present).--Lucas559 (talk) 16:21, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

RfC: List of forestry journals
Input from editors associated with this WikiProject on recent edits to the above-referenced article, including removing most content from the 'Open access' section of the article, would be appreciated. Thank you, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 17:07, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Open source and distiction to WikiProject Software/Free Software
So I'm coming across many articles related to open source that don't have the project's template on their talk page and I'm wondering how open source articles are relevant to the project. For instance why is Open source not listed on the project page under "This includes these topics:"?

And also shouldn't all articles that are featured in WP:WikiProject Software/Free Software also be featured in this WikiProject? What's the relationship between those two WikiProjects? --Fixut͉͇̞͖͉̼̭͉͓͑̈̉́͑ȗ̹̲ͨͮ̂̂̄ṙ̫̥͚͚̜͙͍̰́̈́ė̺̩̞̗̓̉ͧͩ̿ͤ̎̆ (talk) 18:26, 4 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for asking. When we started this project, we had explicit agreement from the Open Access and Open Educational Resources communities that it made sense to combine our discussion pages (with redirects from each WikiProject's talk page), so that people with overlapping interests would have an easier time staying in touch and seeing each other's discussion topics. I think this has had no drawbacks -- though I'd hesitate to call it a shining success, thus far. We reached out to the FOSS WikiProject, but as I recall we didn't get any response. I still think it would be worthwhile to bring in the FOSS project in a similar way, but I'm not about to force the issue.
 * We never had anybody with the needed skills volunteer to do wholesale article tagging. To be honest, I don't know what is required to facilitate that. I suppose I could probably hack something together using AWB, but it would be nice to have some advice from somebody who has done this kind of tagging before...and I'm sure there are lots of little details, such as collapsible WikiProject wrappers and so forth.
 * What do you think is the best path forward? -Pete (talk) 21:49, 5 June 2015 (UTC)


 * WikiProject Open is more about open academia. May I suggest Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Software/Free Software. Fgnievinski (talk) 17:31, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Article tagging
I think Template:WikiProject Open Access should redirect to Template:WikiProject Open so that its transclusions are counted in WP:WikiProject Open. OA-specific information could still be tagged via a new oa=yes template field -- would that require formally demoting WikiProject Open Access to task force of WikiProject Open?). Then a task force OER and a template field oer=yes would also seem fitting. Fgnievinski (talk) 17:42, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Regional US/Canada Wikimedia conference - Washington DC - 9-11 October
Hello. With others, I am organizing WikiConference USA. This community gathering will be Friday-Sunday 9-11 October (with Columbus Day being Monday the 12th) in Washington DC at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Persons interested in participating may present a submission, request one of about 25 travel scholarships, or plan to attend. Thanks.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  16:46, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Open access release request
SPARC provides this document for authors to make a request to publishers that their submission have an open license.

Eventually I would like this file uploaded to Commons, ported to Wikisource, then re-presented in the Wikipedia article on open access and suggested for translation into a few other languages.

It has on it a Science Commons copyright notice, but I am told by SPARC that the website copyright notice supersedes this. It would be nice if when it is adapted and suggested in Wikimedia projects that it has a CC license only to clarify that this is the up-to-date license for this.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  19:35, 18 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Good idea, good project. Do you have an email from somebody at SPARC expressing that? If so, just forward that to OTRS (probably "permissions-commons@wikimedia.org" is the best address) and upload the file with an tag on Commons. I'd be happy to help out with transcription on Wikisource if you like. -Pete (talk) 19:47, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * File:Open access addendum for authors to publishers.pdf  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  20:12, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Looks good. I looked in the OTRS database but could not find the email -- did you send it yet? If not, let me know when you do. Meanwhile, I started a transcription on Wikisource: wikisource:en:Page:Open access addendum for authors to publishers.pdf/1 -Pete (talk) 22:09, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Here, this link is where the final version will live -- looks less messy: Addendum to Publication Agreement -Pete (talk) 22:13, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia for Health/Safety Research and Data
Hello everyone,

NIOSH is pleased to partner with Wikimedia DC for an upcoming conference, Wikipedia for Health/Safety Research and Data, to be held in Washington, DC, on November 12-13, 2015. The goal of the conference is to make the case to government agencies in the United States that helping in the development of Wikimedia content is worth the time and money. Given the conference's focus on making access to information available, I believe this WikiProject would be interested in participating. Please review the proposal on Meta and leave feedback. Thank you, James Hare (NIOSH) (talk) 17:42, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

OA Week Editathon
Pls see meta:The Wikipedia Library/OA week and pls help improve WikiProject Open Access/Open Access Catalogue. Thx. fgnievinski (talk) 15:58, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
 * To elaborate on this slightly: The Wikipedia Library and SPARC are running a week-long editathon for this year's Open Access Week. If you want to get involved and/or encourage others to do so, then the page that User:Fgnievinski linked to will provide all the details of how to do so. - Lawsonstu (talk) 14:31, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Event in Bay Area
Hello, just to let you know about an event on open science and publishing at UC Berkeley. Best, --Giuseppe (talk) 10:27, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Starts Tomorrow! Open Access Week Editathonnnn......
Join SPARC and Wikipedia Library in a Global Virtual Open Access Editathon celebrating Open Access Week from now until Sunday. Help us reach the goal of 1000 improvements to OA content on Wikimedia projects!

Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 03:49, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia and Open Access Panel
Please see Wikipedia and Open Access Panel, a video panel discussion including WP:The Wikipedia Library and open access commentators. This follows the organization of this panel, and conversations about Wikipedia and open access that I narrated on my own blog.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  18:13, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Nice photo from the 2001 meeting that defined "Open Access"
I thought project members might be interested to know, Melissa Hagemann -- a convener of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative, a meeting that provided the first definition of OA -- recently had her colleague Leslie Chan, who took a group photo of the event, upload it to Wikimedia Commons. I have now added the photo to all language editions of Wikipedia with an article on the meeting. I used machine translation for the caption, so I'd appreciate any efforts to improve the captions on those Wikipedias. -Pete (talk) 20:04, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 6
Newsletter • January 2016

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

What comes next

Some good news: the Wikimedia Foundation has renewed WikiProject X. This means we can continue focusing on making WikiProjects better.

During our first round of work, we created a prototype WikiProject based on two ideas: (1) WikiProjects should clearly present things for people to do, and (2) The content of WikiProjects should be automated as much as possible. We launched pilots, and for the most part it works. But this approach will not work for the long term. While it makes certain aspects of running a WikiProject easier, it makes the maintenance aspects harder.

We are working on a major overhaul that will address these issues. New features will include:
 * Creating WikiProjects by simply filling out a form, choosing which reports you want to generate for your project. This will work with existing bots in addition to the Reports Bot reports. (Of course, you can also have sections curated by humans.)
 * One-click button to join a WikiProject, with optional notifications.
 * Be able to define your WikiProject's scope within the WikiProject itself by listing relevant pages and categories, eliminating the need to tag every talk page with a banner. (You will still be allowed to do that, of course. It just won't be required.)

The end goal is a collaboration tool that can be used by WikiProjects but also by any edit-a-thon or group of people that want to coordinate on improving articles. Though implemented as an extension, the underlying content will be wikitext, meaning that you can continue to use categories, templates, and other features as you normally would.

This will take a lot of work, and we are just getting started. What would you like to see? I invite you to discuss on our talk page.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Studies of Creative Commons reuse
I'm curious about the kind of studies that have been done on the types of ways in which academic cc-by or CC0 text is reused (not just open access, so more people can access the text, but what benefits or disadvantages in communication have fields received from making text freer—as in cc-by or CC0 and as opposed to cc-by-sa-nc, etc.) czar  03:47, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Free software listed at Requested moves
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Free software to be moved to Free_software_(FSF definition). This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 12:29, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 7
Newsletter • February 2016

This month:

One database for Wikipedia requests

Development of the extension for setting up WikiProjects, as described in the last issue of this newsletter, is currently underway. No terribly exciting news on this front.

In the meantime, we are working on a prototype for a new service we hope to announce soon. The problem: there are requests scattered all across Wikipedia, including requests for new articles and requests for improvements to existing articles. We Wikipedians are very good at coming up with lists of things to do. But once we write these lists, where do they end up? How can we make them useful for all editors—even those who do not browse the missing articles lists, or the particular WikiProjects that have lists?

Introducing Wikipedia Requests, a new tool to centralize the various lists of requests around Wikipedia. Requests will be tagged by category and WikiProject, making it easier to find requests based on what your interests are. Accompanying this service will be a bot that will let you generate reports from this database on any wiki page, including WikiProjects. This means that once a request is filed centrally, it can syndicated all throughout Wikipedia, and once it is fulfilled, it will be marked as "complete" throughout Wikipedia. The idea for this service came about when I saw that it was easy to put together to-do lists based on database queries, but it was harder to do this for human-generated requests when those requests are scattered throughout the wiki, siloed throughout several pages. This should especially be useful for WikiProjects that have overlapping interests.

The newsletter this month is fairly brief; not a lot of news, just checking in to say that we are hard at work and hope to have more for you soon.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Open source philosophy
Please join this discussion about Category:Open source philosophy. Marcocapelle (talk) 08:00, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library opens another paywalled database to qualified Wikipedians
 The Wikipedia Library

There are up to 30 free one-year Alexander Street Press (ASP) accounts available to experienced Wikipedians through this partnership. To apply for free access, please go to WP:ASP.

Alexander Street Press is an electronic academic database publisher. Its "Academic Video Online: Premium collection" includes videos in a range of subject areas, including news programs (like 60 Minutes) and newsreels, music and theatre, speeches and lectures and demonstrations, and documentaries. This video collection would be useful for researching topics related to science, engineering, history, music and dance, anthropology, business, counseling and therapy, news, nursing, drama, and more. Cheers! 22:01, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Sci-Hub in the news
I think this is the biggest open access story to arise in a while.
 * This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free.

See Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, and Library Genesis.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  19:48, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Certainly worth mentioning. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:49, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8
Newsletter • March / April 2016

This month:

Transclude article requests anywhere on Wikipedia

In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.

Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)

With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: Wikipedia Requests. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying,  , or  , and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!

Help us build our list!

The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.

If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia Requests and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.

An open database means new tools

WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.

And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.

Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!

On the horizon


 * The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
 * The WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

OpenBSD
I have nominated OpenBSD for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Tonystewart14 (talk) 15:13, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

OMICS Publishing Group listed at Requested moves
A requested move discussion has been initiated for OMICS Publishing Group to be moved to OMICS International. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 09:31, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
 * To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

Advertisement in John Wiley & Sons
The article John Wiley & Sons seems to be written as an advertising brochure rather than an encyclopedic article. The edit history suggests that an editor related to the publisher is partly responsible for that. Please help me fix this! Thanks. − Pintoch (talk) 18:55, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Ad-blockers
I have made a proposal on the village pump that citations also indicate whether the display of advertising is explicitly required to access content. ViperSnake151  Talk  19:47, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Highlighting free to read external links in scholarly references
Have a look at our proposal to highlight open access links in citation templates. Participation is more than welcome! − Pintoch (talk) 17:31, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

discussion about lock colors
I have started a discussion about lock colors at Template talk:Open access Editors here may wish to comment.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:39, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 9
Newsletter • May / June 2016

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, featuring the first screenshot of our new CollaborationKit software!

Harej (talk) 00:23, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Add open license text to article tool for Visual Editor
Hi all

I'm designing a tool for Visual Editor to make it easy for people to add open license text from other sources, there are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including around 9000 journals. I can see a very large opportunity to easily create a high volume of good quality articles quickly. I have done a small project with open license text from UNESCO as a proof of concept, any thoughts, feedback or endorsements would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 10:13, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Kazaro's talk page concern
Hi, I didn't join your WikiProject here yet, but I have a question: Is it possible or rather are you allowing any user talk pages on inputting your stub projects on their own talk page? As I linked on this title of the message, I observed that this Wikipedia user is putting the said stub on his/her talk page that is NOT your concern / not related to the topic. Can you please investigate this? Some users are (I don't think it this way, but I feel it is) abusing those stub to use for themselves. Hamham31 Heke!  KushKush!  00:55, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I think you are referring to edits like this in which the user puts a template from this WikiProject on their talk page. While in general the Wikipedia community encourages people to experiment, in this case, having that template on that page tags that page as a project of this WikiProject and puts it in the cataloging system. I would not mind anyone doing this briefly as an experiment, but I think any WikiProject would say that personal pages should not be cataloged in a work space for any long period of time (ideally only hours at most).
 * It seems that the talk page is cleaned for now.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  13:56, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, after I warned that user NeilN removed those stubs already (and instantly thanked me for that). But anyways, disregard this concern. I'm just only questioning it since it was supposedly be used in articles, not in a userpage. Hamham31  Heke!  KushKush!  14:08, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Proposal for Librarybase: an online reference library
Hello everyone. I have submitted a grant proposal for Librarybase, an online reference library. My goal is to create a unified lookup database for sources based on source metadata gathered from Wikipedia. I think there is in particular a good opportunity for Librarybase to make sure open access research is adequately represented on Wikidata. It could also help make it easier for editors to discover open access research. Please review and leave your feedback on the grant proposal. Thanks, Harej (talk) 00:24, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Open Access Week
Open Access Week is now, the last week of October. In New York we are marking the week with several events. This year I created a category at Category:Wiki Loves Open Access Week to list events. I know there have been others in the past which have not been documented. My hope is from this year forward to keep better records of these events when they happen.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  19:07, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

RFCs on citations templates and the flagging free-to-read sources
See Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:21, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Village pump (proposals)
 * Village pump (proposals)
 * This is a really big deal. If Wikipedia changes the visual identity of the PLOS designed logo, it could happen that the logo changes for everyone. Wikipedia would be the place where the logo would be viewed most often by the most people. Wikipedia dictates the brand more than any other stakeholder. If anyone here has feedback then I encourage comments on this post.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  16:52, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Using openly licensed materials from external sources on Wikipedia
Hi all

I've been working on getting text from openly licensed report from UNESCO publications used on Wikipedia. I think all of the work that I'm doing will be reusable by others to import text from other sources.

The first step was to create clear instructions and an easy to use template to import text which I've now done (with a lot of help).

The next step is to find ways to make it easy for people to find openly licensed text from UNESCO publications to use on Wikipedia articles and in addition find useful references within them as well.

I have created two pages on Wikiproject UNESCO, one for reusing openly licensed text and one for finding references.

I'm now trying to find ways to make it easier for people to find the open license text they are looking for from within UNESCO publications. UNESDOC is the publications database and has a search function but if anyone has any ideas or examples of how else I can help people find useful text I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 16:24, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I had been commenting on this project for some time. It is interesting and relevant to open access, and anyone might join in commenting.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  19:05, 25 October 2016 (UTC)


 * To provide an update on this, I have created a central place to organise the reuse of text from UN websites and publications available at Wikiproject United Nations here.I have also updated Adding_open_license_text_to_Wikipedia to create a workflow for people. All feedback welcome. --John Cummings (talk) 03:52, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

OAbot: help us analyze the results
User:OAbot is currently in trial for approval by the BAG. We need help to analyze the links it has added to 50 pages. A table summarizes the results at Bots/Requests_for_approval/OAbot. We need to check that each link it added leads to a free full text for the cited document, and that it does not violate WP:ELNEVER. Any other comments and suggestions are welcome! − Pintoch (talk) 18:56, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Creating articles on the state of Open Access across the world using text from UNESCO Global Open Access Portal
Dear all

I'm very please to say that UNESCO have made the text from their Global Open Access Portal available under a CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 license, the Portal provides an overview of Open Access for over 160 countries around the world.

We would very much like to use the descriptions as a basis to create Wikipedia articles about Open Access for each of the countries covered and combine it with information from other sources. I think this will be a very helpful resource for many organisations working on Wikimedia projects and the wider open knowledge movement.

I have created this page to help organise and track the creation of new articles using the text including the attribution template needed for the open license text. Please have a look and let me know what you think.

Many thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 14:30, 28 February 2017 (UTC)


 * This is a great idea! Lawsonstu (talk) 16:24, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 10
Issue 10 of the WikiProject X newsletter is here!

This month, we discuss the new CollaborationKit extension. Here's an image as a teaser:



23:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

How to publish your own research?
As a new member of the WikiProject Open I would like to publish my own research as open as possible on Wikidata and WikiSource. Moreover, I would like to prepare the data in a way that the it could be linked on Wikipedia, by using the Wikidata item ID, e.g., Q29540796, alone. Is that something that can be done (manually) at the moment? And is there a guide how to do it? I found a tool to create a Wikidata item from a DOI but thereafter I got stuck. --Physikerwelt (talk) 07:44, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Not sure if this is what you're asking for, but you can link the Wikidata item you made to your Wikisource entry by going to the bottom of your wikidata entry and clicking "edit" next to the title of the box labeled "Wikisource", then you type in the name of the Wikisource page, which will link the Wikidata entry to your Wikisource page. Respectfully, InsaneHacker (💬) 08:35, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

migrating content from UNESCO Global Open Access Portal
Hi all I have created all this pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_Nations/Open_Access_Descriptions

some of them has been flagged for deletion or the format is incorrect following WP:Wikify if any of you would like to help on making the pages more alive and on wiki style before deletion, it will be much appreciated!

thank you (Filippo Morsiani (talk) 13:55, 10 May 2017 (UTC))

Popular pages report
We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject or task force is signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, will post at /Popular pages with a list of the most-viewed pages over the previous month that are within the scope of. We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:
 * The pageview data includes both desktop and mobile data.
 * The report will include a link to the pageviews tool for each article, to dig deeper into any surprises or anomalies.
 * The report will include the total pageviews for the entire project (including redirects).

We're grateful to for his original, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding the reach of, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at m:User talk:Community Tech bot.

Warm regards, the Community Tech Team 17:16, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Proposal regarding WP:PAYWALL (WP:V)
Discussion at: Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability

Some reliable sources may not be easily accessible. For example, an online source may require payment, and a print-only source may be available only in university libraries. Do not reject reliable sources just because they are difficult or costly to access. If you have trouble accessing a source, others may be able to do so on your behalf (see WikiProject Resource Exchange). Some reliable sources may not be easily accessible. For example, an online source may require payment, and a print-only source may be available only in university libraries. Do not reject reliable sources just because they are difficult or costly to access. If you have trouble accessing a source, others may be able to do so on your behalf (see WikiProject Resource Exchange).
 * Current
 * Suggested (new)

''That said, all else being equal, a source freely available to read online is preferable because more readers will be able to verify its claims. If two sources are equally suitable to verify a claim, accessibility is a reason to prefer one over the other.''

Thoughts welcome. Ocaasit &#124; c 11:00, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Identifying the status of resources that have their own Wikipedia articles
Firstly, apologies if this is the wrong place to be raising this issue.

In browsing for podcasts today, I stumbled upon a podcast of a book entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp. Upon further investigation I found that the book is in the public domain, and available for download in both audio (link to LibriVox) and text (PDF) formats, online (the PDF is provided by the Albert Einstein Institution). (Page 2 of the PDF shows the public domain notice.)

This public domain status is not at all clear from the article, and when I checked Wikipedia articles on other books by the same author it was not clear what was in the public domain and what was not. This leads me to some questions:


 * 1) Should Wikipedia articles seek to contain such information - for instance, as part of the 'book' template?
 * 2) If so, how does Wikipedia deal with items that are in the public domain in some places but not others?
 * 3) Should Wikipedia seek to provide links - in articles about public domain information - to a or the public domain source?  (This may not be possible in all cases.)

These questions presumably would apply equally to works with a range of licences that fall short of public domain but permit sharing/copying/viewing in some way. I have not asked about language at all, as I am sure this topic could get very complicated very quickly.

Please feel free to tell me where to go if these questions are misplaced; otherwise I look forward to thoughts from those who have been thinking about how Wikipedia might address the casual browser's request for further information (short of "It's somewhere in the multitudinous links at the bottom of the article"). Ambiguosity (talk) 10:11, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Merger proposals: the issue of the separate Free software movement and Open-source software movement articles
Hello WikiProject members and everybody else interested in the Open movement and its efforts watching this page: please participate in the discussion I started over at Talk:Free software movement: Merger proposals: the issue of the separate Open-source software movement article.

Please comment there and not here for a centralized discussion. Thank you.

--Fixuture (talk) 21:07, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Feedback wanted for instructions for adding OA text to Wikipedia
Hi all

For the past several months I've been working on clear documentation and a metrics tool for reusing OA text on Wikipedia. I've also been working on a project with UNESCO to reuse text from their publications which has helped refine the instructions a great deal. I would really appreciate if you could take a look at the instructions and let me know what you think. The main goals behind them has been:


 * Keep them as simple and concise as possible (something that many sets of guidance on Wikipedia really struggle with).
 * Make them usable by less experienced Wikipedia editors

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 19:00, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

PLOS ONE listed at Requested moves
A requested move discussion has been initiated for PLOS ONE to be moved to PLOS One. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 00:15, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
 * To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

Guide for access to research: looking for early readers
To help researchers (and Wikipedians), I've been collaboratively working on a now 24-option guide about how to access sources when you don't have access to them. The folks at WP:RX are pros at this kind of digging. Could you give it 10 minutes and feel free to make comments, suggestions, corrections, or additions? Don't hesitate to be bold :)

You're a Researcher without Access to Research: What do you do?

Thank you!

Jake Orlowitz Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

ANI
Just FYI, I just opened an ANI with regard to OABOT. Jytdog (talk) 23:01, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:Copyright suggestion notice
Related to the above, a suggestion has been made to clarify guidance around linking to OA versions: Wikipedia talk:Copyrights. Discussion is ensuing. Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 30 October 2017 (UTC)