User:Tule-hog/Wikiversification

(This is not a parallel term to userfication.)

The term Wikiversification (also versification) refers to the process of adapting features, content, organization, etc. from other MediaWiki projects. This page lays out some considerations to keep in mind when Wikiversifying.

This is not a proposal to simply import en masse the design/administrative structure of enwiki, or any other MediaWiki project. It is meant as a reminder of our place in the MediaWiki ecosystem, and as a formalized set of guidelines/recommendations on how to interact with it from a Wikiversitan perspective.

Standardization can play an important role in aiding interwiki users onboard to this project. For example, Category:Wikiversity maintenance and Category:Wikiversity administration are direct counterparts to w:Category:Wikipedia maintenance and w:Category:Wikipedia administration (in terms of actual contents, not in terms of visual presentation). Of course, many of our templates and modules are also merged from another MediaWiki project - this is one of the essential qualities of the shared MediaWiki infrastructure. These parallels make it easier to identify how projects correspond to each other, to share maintenance techniques/processes across them, and utilize learned experience (e.g. determining the scope of certain content categories).

Redirects

Redirects (and their categories) are useful for a variety of reasons from ease-of-use to ease-of-maintenance. Many users actually import redirects wholesale without knowing about {{rcatsh}} or any other Category:Redirect templates. As such, those categories were unintentionally populated before they were properly initiated. These should be more officially adopted by Wikiversity.

Templates

Substantial portions of the Wikiversity template and module architecture is built from importation or adaption from other Wikipedias. We should find ways to distinguish imported templates that can be easily updated with those that require substantial modification to be applied to Wikiversity.

Further, we should work to (when possible) preserve the naming schemes of fundamental templates/modules from other projects - this is particularly important/helpful due to the amount of already existing imported architecture (for example, the ease of using other project's directories of templates. For example many documentation directory templates are unintentionally very well filled out - these should be more explicitly adopted by Wikiversity (and modified where appropriate).

Import schemes

While many templates/modules require substantial surrounding infrastructure, others can be pretty directly imported. However, even then there are a few key changes to watch for:

From Wikipedia

• 'article' ➝ 'resource'
• 'wp'/'WP' ➝ 'WV'
• 'wikipedia' ➝ 'Wikiversity'
• Interwiki linking
• MOS: links will not work on Wikiversity.
• remove any counts from {{high-risk}}

Naïvely following these rules without an understanding of templates/modules will typically not produce the desired results. It would be good to make meta-templates describing whether a module/template has been substantially 'wikiversified' and should not be roughly imported without adapting it to the local version's changes.

Could seek approval for the Template task force to undertake widespread versification of direct imports.

Categorization

As wikis evolve, categories must adapt to meet both content and administrative purposes. One concern that becomes more pressing as the project becomes larger is the naming scheme; a common solution is to append the project name to maintenance categories (i.e. Wikiversity) to prevent conflicts with mainspace categories (i.e. categories concerning resources and used for navigation of that content).

In other cases (i.e. not simply distinguishing content from maintenance) the project name is used to distinguish editor from learner content. For example wikipedia:Category:Help is divided into Reader help and Wikipedia help (i.e. editor and maintenance help).