The Dutch Wikibooks is a rather small project compared
to the EN:WB and for
instance DE:WB (and WV's as well)...
The reason not to want to start WV in Dutch is therefore purely practical.
There is some difference between not wanting to do it "now", and not wanting to
do it "ever". If you take steps to make wikibooks more inclusive, and thus
prevent wikiversity from ever separating from it, that is what I consider to be short
sighted. However, if you keep Wikibooks "pure" in the sense that you only
include books and not all sorts of other wikiversity-like materials, and allow wikibooks
to grow into a strong pillar, then a separate wikiversity project makes an excellent
compliment to that.
As presented by Cormac using Wikibooks as a repository
for learning
resources which can be used in Wikiversity is a view I agree with. But that
is not a reason to not host Wikibooks within Wikiversity or the other way
round.
Exactly right. the two projects are symbiotic, and can really help to build each other up.
I don't feel that they should be merged, because they do have different goals.
For instance if I look at the featured project on
Wikiversity which is: Filmmaking, I really don't see why this is not an
instruction book and could be hosted on Wikibooks as well.
That does sort of bring up a good point, that many people tend to gravitate towards the
rigid book structure of wikibooks, even in wikiversity. Because of the
"features" of mediawiki, I think that many materials do tend to evolve into
book-like shapes over time. This even happens at Wikipedia, where collections of related
articles tend to rely on each other heavily. Such collections of articles have been used
in the past as a starting point to new books (with varying degrees of success).
I think that MediaWiki encourages the organization of content into books, and so it doesnt
surprise me that some of the better WV courses appear very book-like. If anything, this is
really a software limitation that works against Wikiversity, and I think the most
important aspect of this all is whether or not WV can overcome that limitation. Because if
time shows that Wikiversity is adept at making books, albeit in a slightly different
manner, there might be a strong case to be made for a merger between the two projects.
So in short: I would welcome to start with Wikiversity
within the Wikibooks
project, having a separate entree (a redirect from
nl.wikiversity.org) but
not splitting up the community. At least not until we are bigger and until
the idea behind Wikiversity stands.
So long as you keep an open mind about it, that's perfectly fine. Like I said, time
will tell all things.
--Andrew Whitworth
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