Thursday, October 1, 2015

Asian black bear: World University and School's proposal to prepare to donate WUaS to Wikidata September 2015, World University Realistic Detailed Proposal as a Set of Instructions


Dear Lydia and Wikidatans,

Here below and attached is "World University and School's Proposal to donate WUaS to Wikidata." You'll also find it here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n02XHzbTE8rY14p-ei6WSNtCQZ8AYscgwI6ncMXolpo/edit?usp=sharing.  

I look forward to further communication about this with you and Wikidata. Thank you!

Sincerely,
Scott

*

Lydia and All, I plan to update this in the Google Doc, as well.


*


Wednesday, September 30, 2015


Lydia Pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia
I help people make awesome happen.




Dear Lydia (and Wikidata), 

Thanks for writing to me in the last Wikidata office hours, Lydia, that: “you're (Scott) asking this question a lot :) I think no-one has any meaningful answer because it is very vague on what you are actually trying to do and how. i recommend taking the time to write a realistic proposal down in detail” (https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.2015-09-23-17.01.log.html).

Here again is the question I asked:

In preparing to make a present of CC wiki World University and School, which is like Wikipedia/Wikidata/Wikibase in 289 languages with best STEM CC OpenCourseWare (e.g. accrediting on CC MIT OCW in 7 languages and CC Yale OYC) and planned in all 7,941+ languages and 257+ countries, for CC Wikidata's third birthday, I'd like to follow with an inquiry about how best to do this in these office hours. I just spoke with the WMF Languages Engineering Team about this last Wednesday - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW5l7fNeMQg - and have been in touch also with Magnus Manske. This would also involve exploring developing CC MIT OCW in CC Wikipedia/Wikidata (and CC WUaS too). Would it make sense to turn all parts of a MIT OCW course into Wikipedia pages for translation reasons into all 200+ countries’ main languages?


There are two parts to this proposal, Lydia: Part I – preparing to donate CC WUaS (and by extension CC MIT OCW and CC Yale OYC) and develop it in Wikidata; and Part II – preparing to donate CC WUaS’s universal translator resources to Wikidata. This email will focus only on the former.



As I’ve written before, I'd like to prepare to make a present of CC wiki World University and School, which is like Wikipedia with best STEM CC OpenCourseWare (e.g. accrediting on CC MIT OCW in 7 languages and CC Yale OYC) and which is planned in all 7,941+ languages and 257+ countries, for CC Wikidata's third birthday. 

By doing this, I hope our "babies" of Wikidata and World University and School might grow up a little further together and learn from each other conversationally - and especially coding-wise. 

And I hope that, in preparing this present, CC World University and School can become a stellar growth story for CC Wikidata/Wikipedia as well. 

Before making this present however, I'd like to ask if we could communicate further about ways in which World University and School might be further developed within the broader Wikidata community and how best to do this, and do so partly with this realistic detailed proposal.


In terms of a realistics proposal, and as a growth story for Wikidata, for developing MIT OCW in 7 languages in Wikidata, as well as for WUaS’s 720 wiki pages (only in English so far), World University and School has the beginnings of MediaWiki installed - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/mediawiki-1.24.1/index.php?title=Main_Page - (and this link is also accessible here at World University too - http://worlduniversityandschool.org), but MediaWiki is very buggy and is spewing emails for one, so World University and School has had to shut it off, World University also has the basis for an extensible SUBJECT TEMPLATE for developing wiki subjects/school plus much more - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/SUBJECT_TEMPLATE - and would like to develop these with CC MIT OCW in 7 languages and CC Yale OYC planning for credit universities, and World University has met twice in Cambridge, MA, in person with the MIT OCW external relations director at the time over a span of a number of years. 

Wikidatan Jane Darnell recently posted a good example of how World University might begin developing MIT OCW in Wikipedia/Wikidata. Learning from her recent project of publishing her "first wikidata-generated list article n English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia here" - 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Jacob_van_Ruisdael (linked here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_van_Ruisdael) - and engaging MIT OCW Translated courses - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/ and other Wikidata items, I'd like (and tried) to create a list of CC MIT OpenCourseWare like the paintings in her table in CC Wikipedia linked to this page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare. I'd also like for World University to create this list of MIT OpenCourseWare’s 2300 courses in English for all 7 languages at MIT OCW Translated courses (and MIT OCW has far fewer courses in non-English languages) in all 7 Wikipedia related languages, and eventually anticipate linked open data and inter-lingual questions and translation (and even an universal translator), in beginning to develop MIT OCW in all countries’ main languages.


Based on some of the code from the page of paintings Jane Darnell recently published, I began a “List of MIT OCW” page -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MIT_OpenCourseWare - to list courses by creating a table learning from Jane Darnell’s table of paintings based on these http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm and vis-à-vis Wikidata but only found this in Wikidata - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1637597). But I wasn’t sure how best to "fill the rows by pulling MIT OCW data from the list items on Wikidata". As I mentioned I only found this in Wikidata Q-Item for MIT OCW - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1637597 - and would probably need to fill this in a little as well with current MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and MIT OCW Translated Courses (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/), But I wasn’t sure how to further generate this list and wondered what the best ways to do this would be re: "This list is generated automatically from [[Wikidata]] and is sorted by date of creation. To make changes to the list, see the talk page" - beautiful automagicality.”


Part of this proposal also involves finding Wikidatans/Wikipedians who also know Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Farsi and Portuguese  for these courses - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/translated-courses/ - as well as for most countries’ main languages, which I think that Wikipedia/Wikidata communities in 289 languages may be able to facilitate!


So as a broad proposal, and in terms of machine learning, artificial intelligence and other WikiMedia Assets, I wonder if Magnus Manske could develop the following WUaS Templates in MediaWiki, in conjunction with possibly sjoerddebruin, ricordisamoa and other lead developers at Wikidata, and encode these MIT OCW courses and Yale OYC courses and these other assets in Wikimedia (https://www.wikimedia.org/) as a way to donate World University and School in conjunction with MIT OCW and Yale OYC to Wikidata.



Jane also suggested in preparing to make a present of CC wiki World University and School to CC Wikidata for its 3rd birthday to "talk to somebody with lots of edits in the educational area on courseware to answer how you get around the notability issue." So I reached out to Len Tower in Somerville, MA, who has edited the Wikipedia MIT OCW page a fair amount, and it turns out he and Larry Viehland, who works on World University and School with me, know each other from MIT in the 1960s, from which they both graduated around that time.


My intention is also to make it easier to enjoy MIT OCW in its 7 languages, and indeed in countries’ main languages’ plus, and especially for credit and university degrees. So I'd like to ask whether it might make sense, alternatively, to try to develop WUAS specifically in Wikipedia which can become the basis for this, and then perhaps explore building the 720 WUaS templates, wiki pages, and related resources I've developed in Wikia around this.

Wikidata is an impressive and growing organization, and Wikidata is an amazing development in general, and I'm a relative newby to all of this - and am seeking to learn some Wikidata ways, in making this proposal

In terms of the logical ontology and semantics of this proposal, World University and School would like to be “part of” Wikidata, and encourage, if needed, inference rules into software in the backend software.

World University and School is also planning to accredit first in the state of California (with BPPE and WASC senior) and then seek to accredit in other countries, and offer these courses in multiple languages for credit and grades degrees. So part of this detailed proposal involves outlining how this might work. In a related vein, World University has also been Google-verified and so part of this proposal would involve working with Google resources (Google Education/Classroom/Translation in part/Street View/Earth for classrooms even etc.) in developing aspects especially of the accreditation side.





World University Detailed Proposal as a Set of Instructions

Here’s a detailed proposal vis-à-vis Wikidata (without knowing machine learning / open linked data) as an Exploratory and Making-Oriented Set of Instructions:

1 Develop WUaS’s main Subject Template(s) in MediaWiki in conjunction with Wikidata anticipating wiki-adding of databases as well as machine learning -

1a
It's particularly these following sections on each WUaS TEMPLATE page, for example, which World University would like to build fully into Wikidata, again as examples, since there are certainly many more Wikidata assets and related applications that could be designed in

SUBJECT_TEMPLATE#Q_item_in_Wikidata
SUBJECT_TEMPLATE#Select_Wikidata_Queries
SUBJECT_TEMPLATE#Wikimedia_Commons
SUBJECT_TEMPLATE#Wikipedia




1b
Then further develop WUaS Subject Template(s) in MediaWiki with these WUaS sub-templates –

Develop each of the following databases for all 7941+ languages -

LANGUAGE_TEMPLATE -

LIBRARY_TEMPLATE -

NATION_STATE_TEMPLATE -

MUSEUM_TEMPLATE -
potentially a MUSICAL INSTRUMENT TEMPLATE –


2 develop MIT OCW courses in each of their related WUAS subject pages based on existing WUaS wiki pages in Wikia, and anticipating offering them for credit and in relation to Wikidata. ...




2a
Develop CC MIT OCW Audio-Video courses in Wikidata -
beginning in Wikidata with the MIT OCW course’s subsections, and anticipating translation into other Wikipedia languages, for example here  -
For example, these are the main headings and subheadings for the above, so develop these in Wikidata -
Course Home
Video lectures
Subtitles/transcript
Online textbooks
Assignments and solutions
Exams and solutions
Recitation videos
Syllabus
Software
References
Download Course Materials

2b
Develop the above headings and subheadings in conjunction with WUaS’s first planned majors:
Computer Science
General Science
Engineering
History
English
Business
General Education
Electives
… as well as the rest of MIT OCW’s majors by department here - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-department/

2c
Pilot project
To focus this as a pilot project, develop potentially three MIT OCW languages in Wikidata – for example English, Spanish and Mandarin for a bachelor's degree. 


3 Develop Library Resources wiki subject page with Wikidata resources as well as Wikitext and Wikibooks ... and other Wikimedia (https://www.wikimedia.org/) assets, in Wikipedia’s 289 languages and planning for all 7,941 languages

LIBRARY_TEMPLATE -

3b
Do so similarly with Wikidata resources as well as other Wikipedia resources for


NATION_STATE_TEMPLATE -

MUSEUM_TEMPLATE -
and potentially a MUSICAL INSTRUMENT TEMPLATE –
http://worlduniversity (not yet begun)



4


Then develop the following ~10 main WUaS pages around these above WUaS templates and with Wikidata, beginning with Languages (all) and Nation States (where World University plans to accredit and also develop online Law and Medical Schools in their main languages) –

Languages (3000-8000 - Wikipedia has about 289)

Nation States+ (200ish)


And then with the following in all/most languages and countries –

Courses (where anyone can add one - and in all languages)


Subjects (where anyone can begin one - and in all languages)


You at WUaS (secure, for course credit – perhaps in conjunction with Google - and in all languages)


Research (online STEM, MIT, Harvard-level, science and in all languages)


Library Resources (for free online library databases, and where people can add them, and in all languages)


Educational Software (Add an app you wrote - and in all languages)


Museums (any with substantial online free content - and in all languages - and also add national museums for research purposes)


Hardware Resources (Developing world-related, lowest cost, innovative, high quality),


(and the WUaS Foundation


(And here are some blog entries, among others here, which explore some of this too:





- for reference).


5

Develop the following Colleges and Schools and related pages similarly as above, in Wikidata, and also potentially in conjunction with Google.









(beginning with United Nations' languages - Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian, Spanish)



Part II

Universal Translator in Wikidata: This part of the WUaS proposal to follow at a later date, and potentially in conjunction with Google too.



In preparing to donate CC World University and School to CC Wikidata, anticipating both accreditation and many/all languages will be central in the design and building. World University seeks undergraduate student applicants in the autumn of 2016, who would then matriculate online in autumn 2017, first in English, then in CC MIT OCW languages and U.N. languages, and potentially graduate in 2021; many of these students will be studying from their high school rooms in most countries in the world. World University seeks to become the Harvard/MIT/Stanford/Oxbridge greatest universities in all countries main languages.

Addressing the question of community support in terms of maintaining this will be important and, potentially, matriculated students in multiple languages will be developing community asset for this. In general, there's much community support for Wikipedia as well as MIT OpenCourseWare, which I hope, in preparing to donate to Wikidata, World University and School could build from.

Thank you, Lydia, and looking forward to further communication about this.

Best regards,
Scott






-- 

- Scott MacLeod - Founder & President  
- Please donate to tax-exempt 501 (c) (3)
- World University and School
- via PayPal, or credit card, here -
- or send checks to
- PO Box 442, (86 Ridgecrest Road), Canyon, CA 94516
- World University and School - like Wikipedia with best STEM-centric OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization. 

World University and School is sending you this because of your interest in free, online, higher education. If you don't want to receive these, please reply with 'unsubscribe' in the body of the email, leaving the subject line intact. Thank you. 















...



No comments: