Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax,
stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a
community to come up with a name.
I believe what we currently call Departments we should call Schools (so
there'd only be like 7-10 of them), and within these schools we'd have
Departments in the form of subpages (e.g. School:Engineering and
Technology/Audio Engineering). These departments would be responsible for
lessons. And there'd be no deans but departmental advisors.
Portals and topic pages would be unrelated to this school scheme -- they'd
be their own way of presenting topics.
Also, once we have a consensus on the name, we should have one individual
responsible for the transition so there's no mayhem. I'd be more than happy
to be the person.
Before we start working on a workable definition, should we put something in
the Site Notice about how instead of making schools we should work out a
reasonable definition, then link to relevant discussion?
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Currently, schools are part of departments,
however departments can
serve better as being part of schools. If that's the case, what should
schools be part of?
I think the original idea behind schools was to have about five or six
different schools that would hold all of the Wikiversity content. The
problem was that there wasn't any firm policy set up to deal with
letting these get out of hand, and every new contributor to Wikiversity
it seemed decided to start their own school.
To keep this organized in even a semi-haphazard way, the "schools" were
then grouped into departments just to try and put a sense of order to
everything. That is why the situation seems to be reversed.
To really muck things up, when I started moving content over from
Wikibooks to Wikiversity, I decided to switch the order of things (based
on some IRC discussions about the topic where the other IRC participants
seemed to have agreed. But not everything was renamed, so we are sort
of half-way between the transition. In some ways I'm deliberately
leaving this, so others can put in their $0.02 on the direction we
should go, or if we should abandon the whole idea of schools and
departments altogether.
BTW, some of the old Wikibooks "Schools" in turn have additional
"departments", so there are other levels that need to be either
"flatened" or somehow reorganized as well. I think it has been
generally agreed upon that we are going to get rid of the "deans" of
each school, and come up with some other organizational system.
--
Robert Scott Horning
_______________________________________________
Wikiversity-l mailing list
Wikiversity-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l