Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Higher education

WikiProject Higher education
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Statistics
Higher education pages by quality Quality Total FA 37 FL 50 A 1 GA 165 B 833 C 2,813 Start 14,028 Stub 14,655 List 1,354 Category 25,196 Disambig 127 File 5,478 Project 26 Template 1,883 NA 1,119 Assessed 67,765 Unassessed 6,110 Total 73,875 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 172,203 Ω = 5.29
Things To Do
Work on articles that need cleanup. Create a page for every university and college and add {{infobox University}} for it. See the missing list for those institutions still awaiting articles. Place {{WikiProject Higher education}} on every related talk page. Combat boosterism wherever it appears Ensure all articles, including Featured articles, are consistent with the article guidelines.

College of Remote and Offshore Medicine

This page is in draft form, it is a degree awarding institution on Malta. The draft has been rejected once but it looks like modifications have been made since. Would benefit from the input of people used to writing/editing higher education ages. Draft:College of Remote and Offshore Medicine 2A00:23EE:11A8:2B68:BC82:C8EE:101F:51C0 (talk) 19:28, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Preferred college ranking

What is the best source we can use for rankings for the University of Minnesota in the Minneapolis article?

What we have now: College rankings for 2023 place the school in a range of 44th to 185th (2021) for academics worldwide. QS found a decline over a decade. Shanghai finds excellence in ecology, business management, library & information science, and biotechnology.

I used what Wikipedia calls the three "most influential and widely observed university rankings" college ranking orgs, but got a question on them. Now I'm wondering if somebody puffed up those three articles? I have looked through the RSN archives, this WikiProject, Wikipedia:College and university article advice, a B-class article according to the WikiProject: College and university rankings. Also looked at two FAs, Boston, Cleveland, and (former FA) San Francisco, none of which seems to follow a standard. Boston cites the Carnegie Classification and membership in the Association of American Universities. Cleveland and San Francisco cite US News & World Report. WP:RSP says US News & World Report is generally considered reliable. So I am tempted to go back to it despite the new WP:USCITIES guideline.

References

-SusanLesch (talk) 13:42, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

@SusanLesch, good question! Our advice page talks about rankings here and here. I think what you really ideally want, more than rankings, is high-quality sources discussing the reputation of the university. I would search the site of Minnesota's main newspaper(s) to see if there are articles that discuss the university's prestige. If the college has a book on its history, the reviews of that (on JSTOR) can be another good place to find something. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 14:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your response, User:Sdkb. So you are saying I won't get an answer on this talk page? Are the sources I have used reliable and acceptable to this WikiProject? If so, we are done. If they aren't, is US News & World Report acceptable? That's an easy fix. If none of the above are acceptable, then are the Carnegie Classification and the Association of American Universities? If the answer is that none of these are acceptable, that would be the time to start digging as you suggest. -SusanLesch (talk) 19:31, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The sources used are fine, and are identified in multiple sources as being the three major international rankings. The US News rankings of American colleges and universities are the main national rankings in the US, but their (separate) global ranking is comparatively recent and hasn't achieved the same level of recognition (not that it's unreliable, except to the extent that all rankings are subjective analyses with their own biases, just that it's less prominent). But it's best to include more than just rankings in the "reputation and rankings" section, if possible, so it would be worth searching for information on the reputation of the university. If there are certain subjects that the university is particularly known, it might be worth mentioning these as well (assuming this can be independently verified, of course). Watch out for media coverage that is not truly independent but is repeating (or paraphrasing) what the university has told them in press releases, and for claims (like something being "world famous") that require more than local coverage. When talking about rankings or reputations, make sure to follow WP:VOICE and WP:SUBJECTIVE and be clear that these are opinions of certain people or organisations (preferably named), e.g. "Is ranked in the top 200" should be accompanied by "by Times Higher Education" (or whoever), or "Is considered Minnesota's top university for wood carving by Wood Carving Today", etc. Robminchin (talk) 21:09, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Much relieved! Thank you, User:Robminchin. You both seem interested in reputation. We have one paragraph in a city article so might not include more. For the archive in case somebody's looking later, "Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and Shanghai Ranking (the Academic Ranking of World Universities; ARWU) are considered among the most established and prominent global ranking bodies." Elsevier (a partner with QS) lists seven, and among them is US News & World Report. Hope this helps.

References

-SusanLesch (talk) 23:39, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:32, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Armorial of Australian universities

Draft:Armorial of Australian universities needs some help. Robin S. Taylor (talk) 12:59, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Robin S. Taylor, heraldry is a fairly specialist field. I see you created Armorial of British universities, perhaps some editors there would be interested. Also you could look at Australian university articles to see who created the images for their coats of arms on Commons. TSventon (talk) 14:37, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Invitation to join discussion at Harvard University

You are invited to join a discussion at Talk:Harvard University#Non-NPOV material in the lead about whether, with reference to WP:HIGHERED REP, a statement about prestige is a fact that can be given in WP:WIKIVOICE or an opinion/reputational statement that should follow the policy on Describing aesthetic opinions and reputations. Robminchin (talk) 03:03, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Please note that "...or an opinion/reputational statement that should follow the policy on Describing aesthetic opinions and reputations" is an attempt to slant the discussion in favor of Robinmichin's own opinion; many other editors disagree with that viewpoint. ElKevbo (talk) 03:33, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I was attempting to describe the discussion by briefly presenting what appear to be the positions. I thought it was obvious that there was disagreement with that viewpoint, but I could be mistaken. Would you like to suggest better wording (and, as the other participant in this thread, would you object to the thread being deleted and replaced with improved wording)? Robminchin (talk) 04:18, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

It's done; let's just let it go. ElKevbo (talk) 04:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Transfer Admission Guarantee

Transfer Admission Guarantee suggests that it refers to a general concept, but the article and all the search results I've found refer specifically to an agreement between University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges. Am I wrong? —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 03:48, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

It sounds like a specific instance of an articulation agreement (the caps in the title also imply a proper name, but sometimes things end up in title case even though they're not supposed to). Although it seems we don't have an article on articulation agreements, just on the general process of articulation. Robminchin (talk) 06:26, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Need-blind institutions

I recently created a category for need-blind institutions and added the ones listed at need-blind admission. An editor complained on my talk that not all such institutions have cited mentions of their status in the article body, so I've begun going through the category to add those where needed (currently alphabetically at "Ch"). If anyone wants to join in, feel free. There are citations for most at the need-blind admission article, so all that's needed is to write a sentence and copy that over. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:26, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Additional editors requested at Talk:University of Chicago

Can some editors please drop by Talk:University of Chicago and participate in the ongoing discussion about material in the lede of the article? Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 21:03, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

NACUBO Endowment data is now available on wikidata

Hi all, Two years ago, I decided that I was going to update all the infoboxes with endowment data from the then recently released NACUBO Public NTSE tables. I spent two days doing it manually, but then I had this discussion with Sdkb about how there could be a better way – invoking wikidata. He expressed interest in adding this info to wikidata; I thought it would be a nice challenge, but I did nothing about it for next two years.

Last week I decided to learn about it, and I'm happy to announce that I successfully used OpenRefine to add enire excel-sheet worth of 2022 & 2021 NACUBO endowment data to wikidata (& Fall 2021 enrollment numbers as well). Here's an exmple edit to Georgia Southwestern State University qid.

I'm posting here in case there are people interested in making automated edits to {{infobox university}} invoking endowment values from wikidata. Thanks. Kiran_891 ^(TALK) 03:48, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

@Kiran891, this is fantastic news! I edited the infobox sandbox so that it will fetch the Wikidata endowment value if one is present there and not provided here. I previewed it in a few articles (just change the infobox to "/sandbox" and remove the endowment field), and it seems to be mostly working, with a few quirks. They are:

• Sometimes it doesn't fetch the most recent year. To resolve this, we could set the most recent data to preferred priority on Wikidata (with "reason for preferred rank = most recent value").
• The autogenerated Wikidata reference has a CS1 error for a generic value in the author field. To resolve this, I'd suggest changing "author=NACUBO" to "publisher=NACUBO". (While we're at it, adding "language of work=English" and an archive link/date wouldn't hurt.)

Somewhat related to the first point, I noticed that there were a few Wikidata entries that already had endowment info, where adding the NACUBO data created a duplicate. We should try to avoid that if possible just to keep everything clean.

Once those things are resolved, and assuming others here are okay with it, we can make the change go live. At that point, any U.S. institution that doesn't have endowment info in the infobox will gain it. For the institutions that do already have the endowment field filled out, they wouldn't change, which might become an issue over time assuming that the Wikidata info is kept more up to date; how to deal with that is a bridge to cross down the road.

Courtesy pinging @Mike Peel, with whom I've previously discussed making the university infobox use Wikidata before, as this may be of interest to you.

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:20, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

When the infobox in an article is set to use this, does it also display/include the year? ElKevbo (talk) 13:35, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Yep! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:48, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Land acknowledgements

Infoalien (talk · contribs) recently added level-2 sections on land acknowledgements to the articles on various North American universities. I reverted these additions, and they restored them in two cases.

Infoalien, when there are editorial disagreements on Wikipedia, we follow the bold, revert, discuss cycle. Your addition of the sections was a bold edit, my undoing them was a revert, and we're now at the discussion stage, where we try to find consensus on what to do (and the articles should be left in the status quo state until then).

My view is that these sections are largely not appropriate for Wikipedia. We are bound by due weight considerations to follow how secondary sources discuss university histories, and currently, such sources tend to begin those histories at the inception of the institution, with only brief mention of the broader cultural conditions at the time of their founding (which would include oppression of Native Americans). Including information about the Native American history of the university's region, while leaving out other information on the history of the region not directly relevant to the university, solely as a way to highlight or redress the injustice would be an attempt to right great wrongs, which is not allowed.

The exception to this would be where Native American history is directly relevant to the university itself, not just to the region. I could see this being the case for some very old U.S. institutions, e.g. Dartmouth College (originally founded to train Native Americans as Christian missionaries), or for many institutions in countries like Australia. Even so, in those cases, the information should be presented in the history section. It also must be presented neutrally — Wikipedia itself cannot make a land acknowledgement, since that is a political act intended to redress a historical wrong. Our role is only to present the history and (where due) to discuss the actions an institution has taken to grapple with its history. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:10, 22 May 2023 (UTC)