Deletion
Hi Declan,
I've been watching the development of the ruinscape tutorials. Fascinating.
Thinking candidly about this instance -- I think informal educational learning materials are legitimate educational content. I think we may be treading dangerous ground when we exercise value judgements on what is legitimate learning and what's not. Obviously we will develop guidelines/policies on acceptable content, for example we will not permit offensive materials, corporate advertising etc.
I think the best way to address this issue is implementing a more robust metadata system where we categorise content more clearly for example -- informal learning materials, formal curriculum content etc. Speaking personally -- I don't have a problem with the Runescape tutorials -- as long as the content is properly referenced as "informal" learning and that the authors adhere to our values, style guidelines etc.
We're currently working with the Ministry of Education here in New Zealand to develop a metadata framework and implementation for wikieducator. This will more than likely extend and improve the work and early thinking on the Content info box
I think we also need to do a little more work on the deletion template to incorporate the reason for deletion and links to our relevant policies as they're developed by this workgroup.
Good post Declan -- thanks.
Hi Wayne
I had not encountered any of this material before. It strikes me as being similar to the D&D game that folks played on paper (and I assume they still play it online somewhere). I agree about the value judgments. Someone's working hard on this stuff. For that reason I think we need very few and very clear reasons to delete. I don't perceive that we will run out of bandwidth and memory. Tidiness is a non issue because folks link things in ways that provide whatever structure is needed, and that includes no structure as suites.
I think we will end up with some material that may be very informal mixed with material that will be quite structured. I can picture youth groups for example using WE as a platform for organizing learning materials (I'm thinking merit badges or first aid lessons and the like).
I would advocate for very strict criteria for administration-driven deletion. I think user-driven deletions could be simplified to facilitate deletion of misplaced sand-box experiments etc. People need time to play and make mistakes in the knowledge that they can request a deletion.
Cheers,
Declan
Wayne, Declan, and others,
I love that WE values all types of learning materials and that no official judgments are imposed as to the appropriateness or suitability of materials created by WE users, excepting the issues of offensive content, copyright, blatant misuse,.... This is one of the important fundamentals for me.
I suggest we include this sentiment/rationale for the strict "administrator"-driven deletion policy on the actual policy page.
The other piece to this discussion relates to creating policy to help others know why the Zogre flesh eaters page is included -- that is, all pages should have at least one category to help users see how that page fits in with others of its kind.
Alison
