Talk:Heriot-Watt University

message: I removed the following paragraphs from the article because there are not supported by any references.
:Heriot-Watt University is well known because of the high quality teaching in languages (French, Spanish and German mainly) and engineering and sciences (Petroleum engineering courses, for example).
:Heriot watts computer science department however leavs a lot to be desired. whereas other universities take the approch of allowing students to sellect a particular field Heriot watt tries to teach a bit of everything. this results in many students reaching there final year with no specialist knowledge withing a particular field meaning that it is much harder for them to find a suitible job in the long run.
See Wikipedia:Verifiability for why we need references. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 04:19, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Unsupported criticism

message: (I'm posting this to all articles on UK universities as so far discussion hasn't really taken off on Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities.)
There needs to be a broader convention about which university rankings to include in articles. Currently it seems most pages are listing primarily those that show the institution at its best (or worst in a few cases). See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Universities#University ratings. Timrollpickering 22:06, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: University ratings

message: The UK wide universities template contains all the information in the Scottish universities template and more. There isn't any need to use the latter as well when the information it contains is identical to the Scotland field in the UK template. Timrollpickering 21:40, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Templates 

message: Please see :
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heriot-Watt_University&diff=191925423&oldid=190571962
Yet again someone has removed content without commenting why. This is really starting to p&8$ me off. I made the original commit putting this information in, I updated the links as they got outdated. So, lets just settle this. Is Lydia Campbell a notable alumna or not? She invented soya cheese, which I think is notable, and the content is encyclopedic and it's not original research. So the only thing I can think people remove it for is a. vandalism or b. they don't think it's notable. If it's b. then FINE but please SAY SO IN YOUR COMMENT. Since I don't know why it was removed (again!) I want to add it back but I'm at risk of the three edits rule or whatever it is.
So can I have your input please. Was removing it vandalism, or was it because the alumna is not notable enough? 
Thank you for your time. Kymara (talk) 14:20, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Would you consider Eric Henry Liddell (famous Scottish international rugby player, Olympic 400 meter champion, and missionary to China) a notable alumni?  He did not graduate from Heriot-Watt, but he did attend school there (studying chemistry) from 1920-1921 before transferring to the University of Edinburgh. I am not sure if the term alumni implies that the individual graduated from Heriot-Watt, or whether simply being a former student is enough to qualify an individual as an alumni (in which case, Eric Liddell should be added to the list). Tcmahfood (talk) 02:58, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notable Alumni 

message: Hi,
I currently work for Heriot-Watt University in a digital communications role, and would like to update the institution's page to improve its sourcing, make its structure more coherent and add more independently verifiable information. I've written a draft article at User:Robert HW/draft, but in accordance with WP:SCOIC will not publish it or make any edits to Heriot-Watt related pages myself- rather, I will leave it up to the community to decide how much of it is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.
If you want to talk to me directly, leave me a message at my talk page- I'll try and contact you as soon as I can.
Thanks,
Robert HW (talk) 11:49, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Robert, your draft is superior in every way except you left out some of the references for the notable alumni. I'm replacing your version with those.  Thanks for all the effort you put in to this. 67.6.163.68 (talk) 13:14, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Edit Request

message: Only three of the first twelve sources aren't independent. Thumperward, which section(s) are you concerned about in particular? 67.6.163.68 (talk) 05:50, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: That's certainly not how I'd read the first twelve sources. References #1, #3 and #11 are hosted on hw.ac.uk, yes, but #2, #9 and #10 are simply links to records filed by HW (and thus authored by the subject) while #4 and #6 are simply direct links to the root of some organisation's website (and when used to reference material based on a particular body, as they are, are primary to that body). Additionally, #4 is broken (it appears to have been an attempt to link to the internal state of a website which doesn't use GET methods to serve information and thus doesn't have permalinks to results). And of course when one looks at the references after #12, they're almost all direct HW web links. So yes, the article certainly needs additional secondary citations. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:35, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

text: Simply being hosted on a third-party site doesn't make a source secondary: my understanding is that these are public records. Ideally, we would like secondary analysis of these documents, rather than reading the primary sources and drawing our own conclusions from them. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:51, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Independence of sources 

message: I've removed the reference to HW as a research university. As far as I can tell, this is original research. In the US, a research university is a status given by the Carnegie foundation to very top universities in which research funding is concentrated. This formal status doesn't exist in the UK, although the 25 Russell Group universities are its obvious analogy: most PhDs are issued by, and two-thirds of significant academic research happens there. 
HW certainly doesn't get into that, or the top 20 UK universities in which research funding is concentrated. It has consistently ranked outside the top 40 in the UK. It produces 0.6% of the UK's 5 and 4 star rated research - not terrible, but rather less than a university with 21,000 students might be expected to produce. In terms of the amount of quality research produced by each research-active person entered in the last RAE, HW doesn't get into the top 50, ranking some way below London South Bank University and the University of East London. It's clearly not the case that HW is, in comparison with other UK universities, carachterised by especially high levels of research. --Duncan (talk) 09:36, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Research university" 

message: The rankings and achievements section of this article is currently selectively showing the best results possible for the institute. The major general rankings should be included, as this isn't a pamphlet for the university but a factual encyclopaedic article. I suggest inclusion of:
* 2013 QS World rankings #369
* 2014 Guardian UK University rankings #18
Any objections? Jebus989✰ 23:04, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rankings omission 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Heriot-Watt University. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120104002018/http://www.hw.ac.uk/student-life/campus-life/dubai/facilities.htm to http://www.hw.ac.uk/student-life/campus-life/dubai/facilities.htm
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/univ07ten.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 12:38, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Heriot-Watt University. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120430054907/http://www.edinburghrugby.org/team/back-three/lee-jones to http://www.edinburghrugby.org/team/back-three/lee-jones
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:55, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Masters in Strategic Project Management (European) was nominated for merge with Heriot-Watt University. I think they should not merge since the Erasmus Mundus programs were running individually.If that is not the case, then the aforementioned page should merge with Umea University and Politecnico di Milano too. There are already other pages with Erasmus Mundus programs, as e.g. the International Master of Science in Rural Developmentand the only difference between them and this one is that the MSPME had a fixed structure. Additionally, the Masters in Strategic Project Management (European) was a unique program; you were getting three master degrees in 2 years and I think it would be good to be explained somewhere on internet why, after the end of funding of all of the Erasmus Mundus programs. Finally in a previous descusion in the Talk:Erasmus Mundus happened on April 2008 decided " to have a separation of the specific masters description from the Erasmus Mundus page.". Anyone?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nkalyvio (talk • contribs) 00:50, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:   Masters in Strategic Project Management (European) was nominated for merge