Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Open

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About this talk page
This page is a discussion forum for WikiProject Open, WikiProject Open Access, Communicate OER, and the online course Writing Wikipedia Articles. WELCOME! If you haven't used a wiki talk page before: ask a question or make a new comment by clicking "new section", or to reply to somebody else's comment, click "edit" its section header below, and add your comment to the bottom. Always put four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comment (this creates a signature and time stamp). Or watch the 3 minute video to the right! Writing Wikipedia Articles (#WIKISOO) home page: [ Feb-Apr 2014 ]    class pages: [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ]    talk page: [ WT:OPEN ] finishing the course: [ final project | badges ]    self-paced: [ course page ]
Some other ways to connect
Email: Join our email list, or browse its archives. Please discuss anything related to openness and Wikipedia. Chat: You might find other project members on the Freenode IRC network in the #OER or #WikiProjectOpen channels. (These are only very lightly used as of March 2014!)

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)

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!)

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)

Snarfa 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 Bluerasberry, 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)

Mike Linksvayer 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)

Bluerasberry 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, @Mike Linksvayer, @Bluerasberry 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)

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 Jesmion! It looks like the problem was your using multiple accounts. You can be unblocked by copying this text

{{unblock | reason=your reason here ~~~~}}

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)

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 Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism/Resources. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 18:28, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Resources is a bit more bibliography-like. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 18:57, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Mike Linksvayer If you hear of anyone using Wikipedia: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 Wikipedia: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)

@Mike Linksvayer 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. @PeteForsyth, ideas?- Sara FB (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Tiers of OER articles and WikiProject Open importance assessments

I wonder if the tiers of articles listed on Wikipedia: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)

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:

• 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

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)

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)