User talk:MartinMorrison

Also, the obligatory:

A belated welcome!

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, MartinMorrison. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.

Again, welcome! Kieran (talk) 19:54, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

License tagging for File:Sky View of UKZN westville.jpg

Thanks for uploading File:Sky View of UKZN westville.jpg. You don't seem to have indicated the license status of the image. Wikipedia uses a set of image copyright tags to indicate this information.

To add a tag to the image, select the appropriate tag from this list, click on this link, then click "Edit this page" and add the tag to the image's description. If there doesn't seem to be a suitable tag, the image is probably not appropriate for use on Wikipedia. For help in choosing the correct tag, or for any other questions, leave a message on Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. Thank you for your cooperation. --ImageTaggingBot (talk) 17:07, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

UKZN page

Hi there. Good to see a fellow Maritzburger on WP. You seem to have got the hang of the reference system (using the ref XML combined with the Cite:* templates). One thing you may have missed is that you can provide a name attribute to the ref tag, which lets you refer back to the same reference later, ie:

<ref name="author1">{cite ... }</ref>

then later on, to cite the same source again, just use:

<ref name="author1"/>

As for controversies, be very, very careful to provide solid sources, especially when talking about specific people. Apart from Wikipedia having a very strict policy on this, which you should read, the senior management at UKZN have been known to get quite aggressive on the litigation side, and I do believe they have a loyal staff member watching the page.

As for the article, I would suggest reordering the controversies chronologically. I was going to do this, but got edit clashes. It might also be worth adding the 2006 staff strike (which was pretty major but not mentioned on the page at all).

The problem with controversies is that there has been student unrest every few years in one form or another on various campuses since before the 80s. To give a properly balanced view you would need to keep going back a long way, and likely need to use archives of older newspapers, which may be paywalled, but may also be accessible via a university.

Personally, I would try and concentrate on some of the drier, less debatable facts that the page is missing. Check out some other university pages (e.g. University of Edinburgh). Right now, more than 50% of the copy on the page is controversies. Maybe it would be worth splitting that out into a separate page even?

Anyway, maybe I'll waken from my current minor wikislumber and help out. Let me know if you need any more advice, too! -Kieran (talk) 19:48, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. The 2006 strike is related to the action against Chetty and Van Den Berg. They spoke out during the strike, particularly in the Witness in the form of editorials, and I believe that was what drew Makgoba's ire.

But I would definitely consider splitting out the controversy. The page is getting to be about 3:1 for controversy to general information. The way to do this would be to make a separate article, then create a much shorter section in the main article with one paragraph summarising all the controversies, and a link to the main article. Check out University_of_Bristol#2003_admissions_controversy for an example. -Kieran (talk) 20:31, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

One last thing: if you're linking to newspaper articles, especially from South African newspapers, make sure you provide as much indexing information as possible (date of publication, full title, author, etc). The reason for this is that newspapers tend to break the links to articles over time (in SA newspapers' cases, often only a few years later), but you want to make it possible for someone to go into deeper newspaper archives and dig up the original sources if possible. I think you've been pretty good with this so far, but others editing SA articles often only put in the URL, making the sources irretrievable now. -Kieran (talk) 20:35, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Lol - got halfway through explaining how to make a new page, then realised that my example (Controversies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) was showing blue instead of red. Well done. -Kieran (talk) 21:05, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Another thing: have a glance at the manual of style. It's a little long, but a lot doesn't pertain directly to this article. In particular, external links should not be put in the body of the article (but may go under the external links section). In general, the second person is also not used in articles (cf. "see below"). -Kieran (talk) 21:44, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah - sorry, the timeouts are probably edit clashes because we're editing the same sections. In general, though, it's best to do smaller edits and save often. Good work so far, though!. -Kieran (talk) 22:01, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And another thing: be careful of copyright violations. Anything you see on the web has to be assumed to be under copyright unless it says otherwise, and as such you cannot copy and paste it verbatim. It may be OK for short quotes, provided they are clearly indicated as such, but not for whole paragraphs. Another user has already come in and (correctly) hacked out a lot of copyrighted info from the UKZN page. Check out the copyright FAQ. -Kieran (talk) 23:45, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Lol - I believe there was someone from UKZN editing the page, once upon a time -- see User:Ukzn. Certainly, all their edits were to the UKZN article. However, as you can see from their talk page, and from the history on the UKZN article (pre-2009), most of their edits were seen as vandalism, and they were eventually banned for being disruptive. I don't think the university has bothered since, though maybe they should, provided they can find someone who is willing to read style guidelines and abide by the community's norms... -Kieran (talk) 23:56, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:33, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Westwood Mall, Westville for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Westwood Mall, Westville is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Westwood Mall, Westville until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Ajf773 (talk) 10:10, 9 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]