I really only have a minute now so will give background later, but WV has some interesting goings-on going on here:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:Great_Repeal_Bill

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Great_Repeal_Bill

I'm the "guilty party" for importing it to WV, but it seems to me to be a good effort at seeing what else can be done with wikis besides making encyclopedias.

I've been pinged by a couple people on IRC the last few days (by people who I'm unfamiliar with) demanding that the talk page in particular needs to be moderated. It probably does, but last I looked someone named "Major Bonkers" seemed to be doing the job.

Not sure what I'm asking for here, but I'm pretty sure this is the right place to ask.

I suspect that you'll find prevailing opinion to be otherwise.

Well, the wikipedians tend not to take the "sister projects" seriously, while the WR folk tend to think that Wikipedia is not the Most Important Thing In The World.

WR folk tend to have thoughtful things to say. Not always, but usually.

Well now I've seen it all. What makes you think anyone here is going to take WV seriously?

Well, you (pl.) sure seem interested when there's dramah at WV. Maybe that's all you're interested in after all.

Last summer, I took WV seriously for about a month.

Then the goons of IDCab showed up and the project turned into tragedic farce. Had you (SBJ) not played along with them, their invasion might have failed. Since then, it's been abundantly clear that WV is just as much a venue of idiotic drama as WP.

Hands up who thought that Wikiversity would be a hotbed of dramah!

Has anyone actually read this? Based on my initial look-see, I'd say this would set back the cause of "open democracy via wiki" a good ten years, assuming anyone in the UK government actually reads it and takes it seriously. That's probably a good thing, of course.

This is also putting aside the fact that it doesn't belong on Wikiversity - technically it doesn't belong anywhere, but there's nothing particularly pseudo-educational about it. They're just doing this on a WMF-funded project because that's where the users are, presumably. It's little more than political marketing.

I shouldn't comment on the wisdom of dismantling the UK legal system in general, but I do like how they want to repeal parts of the Violent Crime Act because it "inhibits people from pursuing their peaceful hobbies."

That's the post-Dunblane/Columbine gun control legislation they're talking about. You telling me nobody in the US ever trots out the "we only want automatic rifles for peaceful hunting" line?

No...?

Here in the States, we've even got people investing in guns as income properties, in some cases pulling their money out of real estate and stocks to do it. Some assault rifles have almost doubled in value over the last year alone... I just assume this has something to do with the whole "black president" thing and the way right-wingers deal with that, but maybe people have just run out of other safe-money options. I can hardly wait for the folks on Bloomberg and CNBC to start talking about the "gun bubble."

Anyway, I actually didn't bother to look that up, but if I'd been forced to guess, my first guess would have been "something to do with guns," no matter what country the suggestion came from!

I must respectfully disagree. All sorts of exercises are done in modern school/university settings. Some of these could easily be perceived as silly/nonacademic/a waste of time. But once students have started the class and pass the add/drop date then it is usually their problem, and not the teacher's/professor's.

Oh well.

No, we want them for home defense. There is no valid argument for why the police need any given particular type of weapon, which is not just as valid a reason for its availability to any citizen forced to defend himself from the very same violent criminals, in situations when the police happen not to be there. It's very simple.

Perhaps... It actually doesn't matter in terms of what's "appropriate for Wikiversity" or not, since Wikiversity in general is of little consequence overall. But it does suggest that the WMF and the users of its various projects don't really care to limit themselves to "educational" and "informational" reference material; they just want to promote their various agendas as cheaply and efficiently as possible, like everybody else. I see no fundamental difference between this and, say, a vanity article on WP for an extremist website, or an article about some consumer product that isn't available yet, or any number of other things that many WP'ers would call "spam," though that's not what it is either.

I would say that it would be an extremely unusual college-level course that got students together for the purpose of making an exhaustive list of all the laws they want to get rid of in a particular country, whether or not they actually live in that country. And it should be noted that quite a few of the entries simply say "repeal this and start over" without any constructive suggestions as to what the new legislation, if any, should say - which further suggests that they don't want the areas covered to be the subject of any legal strictures whatsoever. If there were any chance of something like this being taken seriously, that could be a dangerous trend.

It's not "unwatched", but tbh the (mostly USAian) custodians haven't been able to make much sense of it.

I'm guessing the "educational/research" part of it will come a few months down the line when the activity on WV is compared to the activity on the "private wiki" and its forum: i.e., a comparison between the "anyone can edit" model vs. a closed model.

I get the impression that this is kinda fringy (as in on the reactionary edge of the far right), but they don't seem to be interested in causing wiki-wide dramahs, so no harm no foul.

I'd have to disagree with you there. While it's not something which would be taught as a whole, in two separate degree-level courses in political philosophy (admittedly, at a den of East coast liberals and a hotbed of the left-green radical movement) "If you were rewriting the constitution which parts would remove?" and "If Britain had a constitution, what should it say and why?" came up at both, which isn't a million miles from this exercise.

Yup.

When I first got involved in Wikibooks (pre-Wikiversity-existence), there was some serious bad blood going around because at the time WB was serving as a "dumping ground" for any content on Wikipedia that had some promise but wasn't encyclopedic. Wikiversity is a much more appropriate dumping ground, since there's not much in the way of rules going on there.

Problem is that these days the folks who vote on and/or close XfDs aren't interested in possibilities, they just want to be part of the clique that defines and enforces the rules. Earnest efforts at experimentation sometimes look pretty silly, but gentle redirection is a much better approach IMO.

maybe it's a marketing issue.

dunnoz

Mm. No, I'm good. Carry on.

I was blissfully unaware of this crap.

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Philosophy#...2C_and_projects]Philosophy syllabus://http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Phil...osophy syllabus

And the "Department of Existentialism":



Please tell me nobody reads this or cares about it.

Half of those 42 are probably various incarnations of emesee.

Yes, we've had a lot of (often silly) "structural pages" created (departments, schools, and so forth), as well as billyuns of pretty much empty pages. It's the "build it and they will come" approach, which of course doesn't always work as advertised.

We also have a contingent that is ever worried about the evils of deletionism, and apparently they're willing to take a stand on any page, any time, for any reason.

Back to the "Great Repeal Bill" though... trying now to push them towards an actual NPOV resource:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:Great_...n_NPOV_resource

Hopefully my "example" isn't so silly as to be insulting:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:SB_Joh...Blue_Tomato_Act

Maybe the better approach would be to get some "real examples"... I was thinking about leaving a note at WP:GLBT about making one up about "don't ask, don't tell". Might be interesting, anyway.

Do what I do on Wikipedia, and point the author of anything inappropriate towards Wikipedia Review. Most people are happy if you point out that there's someone willing to host their vanity page/crank theory and thus don't complain about their material being deleted, Greg's happy to get the extra traffic, and it makes any issues with the article Someone Else's Problem, so everyone wins. It's why Greg is host to additions to the Sum Of All Human Knowledge such as MeatGull.

No offense to Greg, but I think it would be hard to give someone a link to a site called "wikipediareview.com" without sounding spammy. It might need to be taken somewhere else, of course... time will tell.

They do have another wiki, actually, but apparently only the MP can edit it, which kinda defeats the point of bothering with wiki software.

The "anti-deletionism" crap is unrelated to this project, but it would undoubtedly rear its ugly head if and when it gets nominated for deletion.

The Democracy Project and Open Source Constitution was a more structured attempt to learn from such an exercise. -mikeu