[Foundation-l] Wikiversity

Thu Aug 4 16:56:02 UTC 2005

Dan Grey wrote:

>At first, I agreed with Angela - protection is bad
>etc.
>
>Then I read Aya's reasoning, and he has a point,
>doesn't he?
>
>Wikiveristy has apparently failed to gain WM support,
>and hasn't exactly been flourishing.
>
>Wikibooks is a project to collaboratively write
>free-content textbooks. To quote from What Wikibooks
>is not, which Angela restored this morning:
>
>"Wikibooks is not a place for users to publish content
>unrelated to our main objective. In particular,
>Wikibooks may not be used as a personal homepage or
>online file storage. Users who want to use the wiki
>technology for other collaborative efforts should find
>a wiki hosting services such as
>[http://www.wikicities.com Wikicities], or install
>their own wiki software. For more information on how
>to set up the MediaWiki software, please read our book
>on [[Wiki Science]]."
>
>So what possible justification is there for
>"Wikiversity" to freeload off Wikibooks? 
>
>Dan
>  
>
The presence of Wikiversity and Wikijunior on Wikibooks is somewhat 
detrimental to Wikibooks in general, in the sense that it seems to 
encourage other people to come up with their own "pet projects" that 
they want to start and put them on Wikibooks.  This has been a problem 
in the past on Meta where regular contributors to the Proposed Projects 
page have more often than not suggested that Wikibooks is a place to 
throw the project idea.  This doesn't seem to be happening as much now, 
however.

The "announcement" by Anthere that Wikiversity was not a Wikimedia 
Foundation project just added fuel to the fire.  See:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ARequests_for_new_languages#Requests_for_new_Wikiversity_languages

Yes, it hasn't been "officially sanctioned" by the Wikimedia Foundation 
to be put onto seperate servers yet (the German Wikiversity not 
withstanding), but it does seem to offer unique content that really 
doesn't fit into any currently existing Wikimedia project, including 
Wikibooks.  And it is "official" in the sense that just about any major 
project on any server is official that doesn't have its own unique DNS 
lookup.

One of the huge problems with Wikiversity right now is that active 
discussions are going on in several places, including Textbook-l, Meta, 
Wikibooks, Wikipedia, and #wikimedia.  These also seem to be very 
disjointed groups, each with their own goals.  A very similar problem 
currently exists although to a smaller extent with Wikijunior.  IMHO the 
discussion on meta needs to be terminated, particularly with "live" 
projects on another server.  Unfortunately I don't have the political 
pull on meta to achieve that goal, and it doesn't seem likely to happen 
either.  In particular this current issue between Angela and Aya is a 
demonstration of the conflict between the Wikibooks community and the 
rest of the Wikimedia community having a cultural clash, and that the 
discussions about Wikiversity have not been in a consistant community 
forum area.  It takes somebody with agressive searching to find all of 
the relevant content about the role of Wikiversity on Wikibooks and what 
direction it should be taking.  I know for a fact that I have not read 
all of it myself.

There are other issues with Wikiversity, and perhaps this whole issue is 
going to bring to light what the future of this project should be. 
 Certainly Wikibooks is drifting away from the "pure textbook" 
philosophy that it started out as, and is becoming more of an original 
non-fiction book repository.  This is even more so with some current 
actions by Wikipedia users moving content over to Wikibooks.  This 
support role by Wikibooks to Wikiversity is all but gone now in the 
Wikibooks community.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning