Wikiversity:Glossary

This is a glossary of terms commonly used on Wikiversity. For more help, see Help:Contents, Wikiversity:Questions, and Wikiversity:Help desk.

A

Administrator

At Wikipedia, sysops are called administrators, but at Wikiversity, they are called custodians. The various others are known as Bureaucrats and others are authorized to use bots to clean up our foundation.

AGF

Abbreviation for "assume good faith", a guideline whereby one should not assume that a bad edit was done maliciously. See Wikiversity:Assume Good Faith.

Anon

Abbreviation for "anonymous user". This is what you are if you have not logged in.

Also used: IP user.

Archive

A subpage of a Talk page to which some parts of the discussion are transferred, to reduce the size of the Talk page. Rarely, the term may refer to the Wikiversity:Archive page, for obsolete historical material.

See also: Wikiversity:How to archive a talk page.

B

Ban

Banning is the extreme, last resort action by which someone is prevented from editing Wikiversity for a prolonged or indeterminate length of time. Reasons for banning are usually a long history of biased edits, persistent adding of incorrect or doubtful material, refusal to cooperate with others, or extreme incivility and threats. If someone is banned, their username is blocked, and any username or IP that is with great likelihood identified as being the same person can be blocked without any further reason. See also: Block.

Barnstar

Barnstars are a light-hearted system of awards given to Wikiversity editors by other editors to acknowledge good work or other positive contributions to Wikiversity. They take the form of an image posted to an editor's talk page, usually in the form of a five-pointed star. There are a wide variety of different types of barnstar, each indicating a different reason for the award having been given.

Be Bold

The exhortation that users should try to fix mistakes in articles themselves, rather than complain about them. See Wikiversity:Be bold.

Blanking

Removing all content from a page. Newcomers often do this accidentally. On the other hand, if blanking an article is done in bad faith, it is vandalism. If blanking is done to a vandalised brand-new page, it is maintenance, and the page will be deleted by a Custodian within a few hours if no dispute arises. {{Delete}} should be added to the blanked page to draw attention to it, rather than just blanking it. Newcomers often mistake blanking for deletion.

Block

Action by a Custodian, removing from a certain IP-number or username the ability to edit Wikiversity. Usually done against addresses that have done vandalism or against users who have been banned. See also: Ban.

Boilerplate text

A standard message which can be added to an article using a template. For example, {{stub}} is expanded to the following:

Bot

A program that automatically or semi-automatically adds or edits Wikipedia-pages.

See also w:Bots.

Broken link

Also used: edit link, red link.

A link to a nonexistent page, usually colored red. [[Template:]] may display this way depending on your settings.

Broken redirect

Redirect to a non-existing page. Common opinion is that these should be removed.

Bureaucrat

A Wikiversity custodian who has been entrusted with promoting users to Custodian.

See also Wikiversity:Bureaucrats.

Also used: Crat.

C

Category

Also used: cat

A category is a collection of pages automatically formed by the Wikiversity servers by analysing category tags in articles. Category tags are in the form [[Category:Computers]]. The part after the ":" is the name of the Category. Adding a category tag causes a link to the category and any super-categories to go to the bottom of the page. As stated, it also results in the page being added to the category listing. A list of basic categories to browse through can be found at Category:Wikiversity. A user-friendly way to find a category for academic topics is to start at Category:Wikiversity portals.

Checkuser

An access level that lets users with it see the IP addresses of logged-in users, usually to determine if someone is using sockpuppets to violate policy. Currently only granted to certain members of the Arbitration Committee and other trusted users.

See also m:checkuser.

Cleanup

The process of repairing articles that are ungrammatical, are poorly formatted, etc. Cleanup generally requires only editing skills, as opposed to the specialized knowledge that is more often called for by pages needing attention.

See also: Wikipedia:Cleanup process.

Comment out

To hide from normal display whilst retaining the material for editors to see. This is done by inserting the characters <!-- at the start of the comment text and --> at the end. These character strings are used to delimit comments in HTML code.

Community Portal

One of Wikiversity's main pages. It can often be found on the quickbar (on the left side in most skins), and is a page that lists the collaboration of the week, outstanding tasks that need to be addressed, and several other useful bits of information and resources. The Community Portal is useful for picking an article or topic to work on or read.

Content development

The Wikiversity project exists as a website devoted to the creation and hosting of educational content. A general term for the intended Wikiversity content is learning resources. Wikiversity has many content development projects where participants collaborate to create, organize and develop particular types of learning resources. See: Wikiversity:Content development.

Contribs

Short for contributions. These are the edits that a user has made.

Copyedit

A change to an article that only affects formatting, grammar, and other presentational aspects.

Copyvio

Also used: copyviol, and occasionally CV.

Copyright violation. Usually used in an edit summary when some copyrighted material has been added to Wikipedia.

See also Wikiversity:Copyrights.

Crat

Short for Bureaucrat.

Cut and paste move

Moving a page by taking the text of the page, and put it into the edit window for the second page. Generally considered worse than the 'move page' option, because it causes the page and its edit history to be in different places. Cut and paste moves can be fixed by Custodians.

CV

See Copyvio.

Colloquium

The Colloquium is a general Wikiversity community discussion page.

Course

Courses are one type of learning project. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees rejected the first Wikiversity project proposal and instructed the Wikiversity community to modify the proposal to "exclude online-courses". See the Wikiversity e-learning model for thoughts on how wiki technology can be used to assist learning without using conventional courses. See also: Wikiversity:Courses.

Custodian

Wikiversity sysops are called "custodians".

D

Department

A Wikiversity Department is a content development project for organizing learning materials for a narrow topic of study. Example: the Department of Cell Biology. Pages for Departments are placed in the "Topic:" namespace.

Dif

Within wiki projects, a "dif" is the "difference" between a wiki webpage's contents from before an edit to after an edit. The "dif" for any edit can be obtained from the history page of the edited page. Use the "compare selected versions" button. (example)

E

EOD

EOD means "End of Discussion" or "End of Day" - mainly used in business communication (other definitions).

F

Faculty

The term "faculty" is used at some Universities to refer to very large fields of study. Within Wikiversity, such large academic subject areas are organized by Portals.

Foo

Foo - "foo" is often used as a place-holder term. See Foo at Wikpedia.

G

GFDL

GFDL stands for "GNU Free Documentation License" and is the license that is applied to all the text added by editors to Wikiversity pages. See: The GFDL and you.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the portion of the computer program that is seen by a user with graphics and text, as opposed to just text. The simplest way to explain it is to look at the windows you see on your desktop that are part of your Operating System (OS). By using these windows, task bars, buttons, sliders, your keyboard and your mouse, you are interacting with the OS and all the other programs installed into your computer. Without the graphics, you would be using a command line, like in MS-DOS or the terminal of a Linux OS.

I

IAR

Ignore A Rule. In all cases, Wikiversity rules, guidelines and policies exist to facilitate the goals of the Wikiversity project. If a rule, guideline or policy is being used to defeat the goals of the Wikiversity project, then Wikiversity participants should ignore that rule and work to replace it with a rule that serves the needs of the project.

L

Learning project

Learning projects at Wikiversity are usually collaborative webpage editing projects for Wikiversity participants. By participating in learning projects, Wikiversity editors "learn by doing" in the wiki way.

Learning resource

Learning resources are the intended content of Wikiversity.

Lesson

Lessons are one type of learning project. Conventional lessons can be downloaded and used outside of Wikiversity or read by Wikiversity browsers. Other Wikiversity lessons include activities that require collaborative editing of Wikiversity webpages.

N

Namespace

Wikimedia Foundation wiki projects like Wikiversity use a standard set of namespaces. Each namespace holds pages that serve a specific function. See Wikiversity:Namespaces.

NPOV

Neutral Point Of View. Most Wikimedia Foundation projects follow a conventional NPOV policy in order to limit bias in wiki webpages. Wikiversity has the Disclosures policy in order to allow some pages to express a bias.

O

Outing

At Wikimedia projects, "outing" is a term used to refer to unwelcome disclosure of an editor's personal information such as legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organization, telephone number, email address, or other contact information. See: Wikiversity:Privacy policy.

P

Page Section

Wikiversity webpages that have a large amount of content usually divide that content into page sections, often just called "sections". See Section headings.

Policy

Many Wikiversity policies are similar to those for Wikipedia. Other Wikiversity policies are specific for the educational mission of Wikiversity. In all cases, Wikiversity policy exists to facilitate the goals of the Wikiversity project.

Portal

Wikiversity portals are user-friendly webpages that guide Wikiversity browsers to webpages related to a particular subject area. Wikiversity portal pages exist in the "Portal:" namespace. See: Wikiversity:Portal.

POV

Point of view. Wikiversity pages that explore a topic from the perspective of a biased point of view explicitly describe that perspective according to the Disclosures policy.

Prefix

Some page names at Wikiversity have a prefix such as "Topic:" or "School:". Such pages with prefixes are in namespaces, special collections of pages that all serve a related function. For example, pages that start with the "Topic:" prefix are content development projects where Wikiversity participants collaborate to create learning resources for a narrow topic area. See Wikiversity:Namespaces for details.

Project

Project - Wikiversity is a place for collaborative learning projects. Wikiversity has many collaborative content development projects where participants create, organize and develop learning resources for particular subject areas (See Wikiversity:Schools and Wikiversity:Topics). Wikiversity also has community development projects that concern the general function of Wikiversity as a wiki (example: Wikiversity:Introduction Overhaul Taskforce). Within the set of Wikiversity namespaces, the "project namespace" is the "Wikiversity namspace" where all pages start with the "Wikiversity:" prefix. The "Wikiversity namspace" is for policy pages and other pages concerned with the entire Wikiversity project.

R

Revert

"Reverting a page" means returning a page to a previous version of its history.

Rollback

custodians have access to a rollback tool for rapidly reverting the edits of vandals, see: Wikiversity:Rollback.

S

section

See page section, above.

side bar

The side bar holds a collection of links and the search tool and is displayed at the upper left edge of Wikiversity pages.

School

Within Wikiversity there is a "School:" namespace. A Wikiversity school functions as a special content development project that can organize the efforts of Wikiversity participants who create learning resources for a set of related academic topics. See: Wikiversity:Schools.

Stub

a stub page is a short page that needs further development. See Wikiversity:Stub.

T

Template

The contents of a Wikiversity page can be easily transcluded (copied) into other Wikiversity pages. See Help:Template and Wikiversity:Templates.

Topic

Wikiversity has a special "Topic:" namespace for content development projects. See Wikiversity:Topics.

W

WikiProject

At the Wikipedia website there is a "WikiProject" psuedonamespace that places all content development projects inside the "Wikipedia:" namespace. At Wikipedia, all content development projects have page names that start with "Wikipedia:WikiProject". Rather than use a pseudonamespace for content development projects, Wikiversity uses the "School:" and "Topic:" namespaces. See w:Wikipedia:WikiProject and Wikiversity:WikiProject.