Talk:University of KwaZulu-Natal

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Massive copyright violations

Much of the information on this page is taken directly from the UKZN website (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/About-UKZN/History, for example) which is entirely unacceptable. It needs to be rewritten. As per copyright violations I'm going to have to remove it. Someone should rewrite it with appropriate tone, and proper referencing. Manbeargore (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merger of pages

The proposal that the page for the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) be merged with the pages for the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is ill founded. Although UDW no longer exists, and merged with the also defunct University of Natal to form UKZN, UDW also had its own independent (not to mention interesting) history, and merits its own entry.168.209.97.34 20:52, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

UDW is now a part of UKZN and, in the interests of unifying the universities involved, it should be included as part of the UKZN with the view to redressing wrongs of the past. We should look into the future! --John Taylor 11:50, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The past is what it is, right or wrong. UDW should be remembered for its diverse history. No harm in providing links to UKZN both ways. sandman

Funny the old UN page has been merged into the UKZN page.. Typical ..

I do think that both UDW and UN should have separate articles. Both were separate universities, and considered to be separate legal entities. Even for the sake of cross referencing, this is important: Alumni of the separate unversities should be listed under the universities they graduated from. This isn't about inequality, this is about fact. -Kieran 19:35, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I've been bold and reconstituted the University of Natal page. I've sorted out the alumni list, too: Only one of the alumni graduated from UKZN, the rest from UDW or UN. All three articles still need a lot of work, but I do think they should be separate. -Kieran 20:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Copyvio...

The whole article isn't a copyright infringement (as far as I can tell), but the description of the campuses come straight off the university's material. Mikker ^(...) 22:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Viva UDW Viva! The length of the UDW page does not justify UDW, we need more detailed articles, whos going to be the first! May UDW values outlive the capitalistic/elitist mindset of ex-UND totalitarians who are currently trying their best to kill of the remaining UDW culture! (Previous unsigned comment by anonymous user on IP 198.54.202.250)

It seems the clock tower photo by User:Elefuntboy was removed along with the copyvio material. As the photo is GFDL, I've restored it. -Kieran 10:35, 23 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Tone: marketese.

Most of the article reads like its been written by a marketing department, from the Asmal quote in the lead, the 2nd sentence of the history, all of "Vision, Mission, Principles and Core Values", "Choice of Campuses", the ALL CAPS section about Ginwala, ... It may be best to start from scratch. -- Jeandré, 2007-11-16t13:34z

[This is marketing fluff, not a Wiki article] Jeandre is clearly correct. An attempt at a wiki article, produced over some time by various users and with citations etc, has simply been replaced by waffle from the UKZN marketing Dept. This is vandalism. I strongly suggest that we return to the original article that was replaced, wholesale, by user 'UKZN', and then people can work on that, adding citations, challenging material that does not appear to be NPOV etc. But this whole sale replacement of an attempt, however flawed, at a collaboratively written wiki article with marketing waffle is clearly unacceptable. -- Wendy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by W.naidu (talk • contribs) 15:30, 16 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[Yes, an encyclopaedia artice has indeed been replaced by p.r.] I am in full agreement that this page has been vandalised with corporate p.r. It must be reverted and challenges to the original version must be placed inside that article and justified with citations. Likewise any unjustifiable claims in the original article must be challenged and, if not then proven, removed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bjorn Martiz (talk • contribs) 2007-11-17t19:07:31z

Reliable sources.

I've taken the article back to an old version, and removed most of the text since very little was referenced, a lot of the references did not say what it was supposed to reference, and some of the references weren't reliable sources. Please read Wikipedia's rules no verifiability and reliable sources, and make sure all future edits to the article adhere. -- Jeandré, 2007-11-18t20:05z

Hey, I've tried updating some information here. I think campus information is relevant as the wikipedia university guide states. I will try update further with student life and other aspects that are missing. My first time editing so sorry if I make some mistakes. -- MartinMorrison (talk) 15:45, 26 August 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by MartinMorrison (talk • contribs) 15:42, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK, Timeout, please

I suppose I saw this coming, but it is a bit mad.

Ukzn, please stop deleting large chunks of content. This is generally considered to be vandalism and will quite likely end up with your account blocked.
W.naidu, please keep the scandal stuff encyclopaedic, in the appropriate sections and well referenced. Certainly, mention of the various controversies belongs in the article. However, since this is contentious and controversial, everything has to be meticulously cited, and kept neutral. It would also not be good for the article as a whole to end up being an article on the scandals.
Jeandré, please chill out on your removal of big chunks of content. Yes, we do need to get a lot of citations, but it is far better, for things which are not particularly controversial (such as the alumni lists or the section on the structure of the university), to use {{Fact}} tags, but try to keep the information in until someone has a chance to verify or refute it. Your last edit broke the formatting on the alumni list, although admittedly there are people and sections missing from it still, which I will try to restore, carefully, now.

-Kieran 21:21, 2 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, after reading through some of the university article guidelines, I think Jeandré's approach is probably right. I will be working to include the kinds of information that really ought to be included in this kind of an article, with references. -Kieran 21:59, 2 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

REQUIREMENTS TO GET INTO THE VARSITY

I am a student from G.H.S Pietermaritzburg,i would like to know if you have to hand in your stanard 9 end of year report or can you use your first term matric report card to apply —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.34.167.22 (talk) 11:37, 3 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You need to contact the Central Applications Office. - htonl (talk) 13:55, 3 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of "unbalanced" tag

I've removed the tag, at long last. I feel that the coverage of the controversies is now getting pretty comprehensive. It's also been split out into it's own article, so if there are further arguments about its neutrality, they can happen there. Let's keep the main article clean and informative. -Kieran (talk) 21:49, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with the separation of the controversies section into a separate article. What is the motivation behind this? MY impression is that much of the universities notability and press coverage are related to controversies, so they should feature strongly. I guess I would be happier if the controversies were all covered briefly in the main text, and then folks can refer to the separate article for more detail. Is that your intention?Manbeargore (talk) 22:16, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The reason was that the controversies were growing to overwhelm all other information on the page about the university. If you put it back in, and don't count the parts of the article that are just lists, the controversies text would make up about 80% of the article.

But feel free to expand the text in the controversies section to explicitly mention each of the controversies on the main article. I tried to summarise briefly, though, and I wouldn't go beyond a sentence or two for each section.

As for why the university is notable. Well, this is a bigger issue, and really part of the wider problem of systemic bias. The university is notable for a great many things besides the controversies of the last few years. For one, it is among the biggest, highest ranked and oldest in the country. It is also notable for being one of the larger universities to be forcibly merged by government mandated mergers of 2003-4. It also played a major role in the struggle against Apartheid, with the medical school educating many prominent activists including Steve Biko, the main university opening its doors to non-white students in the 50s until barred from doing so by the government, the university students having a strong involvement in NUSAS and the university sheltering and supporting white academics who expressed strong anti-apartheid views.

Unfortunately, although this is all documented, the information is mostly in deeper archives, behind paywalls or in books, so takes a lot of effort to write up for the article. The controversy stuff, on the other hand, is all available in Googleable newspaper archives, and so it has received a disproportionate amount of attention. And that attention is disproportionate even chronologically -- for example the staff strike of 2006 was a huge event, with the four unions representing university staff engaging in joint action for the first and only time in history, and whole institution being shut down for over a week, followed by a much longer working to rule. But none of this was added back then, and the online versions of the newspaper articles about it have largely decayed, so again it hasn't been covered. -Kieran (talk) 23:28, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Even if we grant your premises, your argument seems to be that there is a whole bunch of content that would balance the page out, justifying the inclusion of the controversies section, but that content is difficult to add, so we should put the controversies in a separate article. It would seem like a better solution would be to add the controversies section back, and strive towards an ideal page that includes all the non-controversy content that makes the university notable.

I'm not sure I would grant those premises, however, especially since anything that occurred before UKZN was formed should really belong in the UDW etc. articles, which should be pointed to from the UKZN page. UKZN itself just *is* notable primarily for controversies, which include the original merger, which was considered pretty controversial, if I recall correctly. Manbeargore (talk) 09:08, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Manbeargore, I just want international students to be aware of some of the issues they will face, which the UKZN international office never cares to warn them of. Many head to the wiki page but complain that information is incomplete. Maybe if the controversy section is kept within the main page it will buck UKZN up to add their own meaningful content to their page that you and me do not have access to, to balance it out which helps students also. Either way, we want good South African articles on Wikipedia, especially those with an international context, we need to give South Africans a reason to want to edit them properly, also a reason to learn Wikipedia's rules, and we need different people with different perspectives to do this. MartinMorrison (talk) 20:06, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We need to be careful to focus on writing an encyclopaedic article. International (and other) prospective students may use the article as a travel guide or prospectus, but WP:NOTTRAVEL is pretty clear that that is not its purpose.

Manbeargore, you also need to be careful about the use of the term "notability". This has a specific meaning on WP (see WP:NOTE), and I don't think any tertiary institution is considered non-notable.

Anyway, my concern is that we should be aiming to follow the guidelines (WP:UNIGUIDE) set out by the Universities WikiProject (WP:UNI), while keeping within the 40-50kB of prose recommended by WP:SIZE. Right now, the UKZN article measures about 6kB of prose, but barely describes the recommended topics, namely History, Campus, Organization and administration, Academics, Research, Student life and Noted people. Some of those aren't even mentioned yet. The protests and academic controversy fall under "History", but that section should also contain at least a paragraph on each of the merged institutions -- UN, UDW and Edgewood. Currently the controversies make up 14kB of prose, and growing. If we keep all of that prose in, and try to give equally balanced coverage of all the other aspects, the article would be huge (100s of kB). Furthermore, in practice it will likely take a very long time before the rest of the article does get written, and I do not think that having an article which is 3/4 about controversial recent history gives a balanced view of the subject (the university). See WP:NPOV.

There is also some precedent, in the form of the University of Bristol article, where a 2003 controversy was well summarised and split out into its own article. University of Bristol is a good article (see WP:GOOD), so I think it is a good model to follow.

But I do strongly agree that the protests, strikes and other controversies need to be mentioned, as important historical events. The strongest reason I could see for having the tag in the past was that a disruptive editor, likely a UKZN staff member, had removed most of the mention of them from the article. They are now mentioned, so I think the tag can go. I'm also in some agreement that the summary paragraph as it stands in the article now could be expanded somewhat, but I think that as long as it briefly mentions each of the controversies, that should be enough. Any more and it will severely unbalance the article.-Kieran (talk) 04:21, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't disputing that the university is notable. I would even agree that universities are notable by default. I was echoing a principle from WP:NPOV, namely the last bit of "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint.". UKZN has gained attention primarily for controversy, so it isn't a problem if controversy dominates the page. Also, the Bristol case isn't entirely analogous, since that was a single major controversy, rather than a whole collection of controversies where the only common element is that they happened at the same institution. I would be happiest if each notable UKZN controversy got its own article, with a mention and link on the main page. The ones that don't meet notability criteria could just be mentioned on the main UKZN page. That said, I won't oppose your current plan, which I think is sensible for now. As a side note, you might not want to spend too much time outlining the academic structure etc, since that is all being revised. Again. Manbeargore (talk) 11:03, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, reliable sources need to be taken on a case by case basic. While newspapers are generally fairly reliable for establishing facts about a newsworthy event, they may not represent reliable sources of encyclopaedic information for an article about an organisation. That part of WP:NPOV is I believe intended more for cases where fringe scientific theories (or theories explaining historical events, etc) are given undue weight due to popular opinion (a prime example being climate science).

But I am glad that you agree. I think creating separate articles for each controversy could certainly be done, if you feel the need to cover each in such depth. In all honesty, though, I think that there needs to be a broader historical description of the entire merger process, showing the links between the changes introduced and many of the issue that came about after. That would, however, require somebody else reputable to have made the connections to avoid WP:OR. This would make a good core for the history section.

And nevertheless, simply elucidating the current structure of the university in the main article does, to some extent, speak for itself. -207.6.127.229 (talk) 05:05, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, forgot to sign in. The above comment is from me.

Oh and one last thought. You need to be careful not to try and use Wikipedia as a soapbox (WP:SOAP). It's a far better goal to try to get the article up to GA status, by following the relevant guidelines, than to try to ensure that all the controversies are given substantial coverage. -Kieran (talk) 05:08, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm really not using this as a soapbox. In fact, it would be in my interests to make UKZN look as good as possible. I just happen to think that interesting controversies have dominated since its beginning, and that this should be reflected on the page. I think the only way this could be a GA is if the controversies were covered proportional to the attention they received, as well as actually fixing the rest of the article, which is in a rather poor state. Glad we have no disagreement on how to proceed though. We've met, by the way. Manbeargore (talk) 11:10, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. Personally I'm more interested in sorting out the rest of the article, though. It's a lot less stressful (due to being less debatable, and less likely to result in painful dispute resolution processes with UKZN "Corporate Relations"). Egad. They're not exactly hiding or denying the corporatisation stuff any more, are they? But lol - it doesn't surprise me that we've met. Drop me a line on Facebook or LinkedIn maybe. I should be easy enough to find. -Kieran (talk) 18:58, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

UKZN deleting content again

CorporateRelations has gone ahead and removed the 'Controversies' section from the UKZN page. I have restored it. I don't really know how to report for vandalism but please feel free to do so if you feel it is appropriate. MartinMorrison (talk) 09:32, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well lets wait and see if it becomes a problem. Also, check this policy before reverting too many times, especially the 3RR rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring CorporateRelations needs to discuss this on the talk page, not just make changes. Manbeargore (talk) 10:43, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not to worry. It seems an admin has already blocked the account. In fact, from the looks of it the system may have automatically blocked it after the section blank, which is blatant vandalism. There's a long and somewhat sordid history of people representing corporate or political groups trying to subvert the Wikipedia articles about those groups (e.g. [1]), but the community is pretty good at dealing with it. The thing to watch out for would be further sockpuppets making subtler disruptive edits, which may or may not require a longer process to address. -Kieran (talk) 18:27, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Being a medical doctor

When you are a doctor you must stand for all the responsibility of being a doctor and how much does you pay to finish and get your bachelor's degree 41.115.115.188 (talk) 20:07, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense about kzn university

I don't agree at all about the things people are talking about kzn university it all rubbish . Kzn university is the best I got my bachelor's degree in there guys stop it plz 41.115.115.188 (talk) 20:12, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]