[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

Tue May 10 23:30:07 UTC 2005

Anthere:
> Researchers have a special frame of mind and research requests some 
> abilities which are different from teaching. It is a different job. 
> While the researcher is deeply involved in his research, he tends to see 
> all things through this sort of filter, and lose the sense of reality 
> and of what would really be helpful for students in their future 
> professional life OUT of the research frame.

I'm disinclined to agree with blanket statements like this, but the 
biggest problem I see with your logic is that you seem to assume that we 
have to model Wikisophia after traditional institutions if we combine 
research and teaching under "one roof", and that researchers also have 
to be teachers in such a framework.

This is exactly the problem with the name "Wikiversity", it limits our 
thinking to what is there, when we are trying to create something 
fundamentally new. This is why I refuse to even use this name when 
discussing the project. I am not talking about a "wiki-university" here.

In fact, what I would like to do is to really get to the bottom of these 
questions: What makes a good researcher? What makes a good teacher? How 
can we improve and assess people's ability to teach, or to research? How 
can we directly apply the latest results from didactical and pedagogical 
research to the teaching processes? How can we have meaningful feedback 
processes from learners to teachers to researches, and the other way?

Certainly, the process of communicating knowledge to a larger group of 
people, whether in person or electronically, is always one which can 
have creative and surprising outcomes. I want to build a model where 
students can easily share ideas with people who are at the forefront of 
research, while being taught by those who have a proven ability to do 
so. We have to separate the discussion about *role selection* from the 
discussion about what roles should be allowed within a single project.

Your analogy with "Current events" answers your own point: Research can 
begin as a section of Wikisophia, we can experiment with it, and we can 
assess how much sense it makes to develop this into its own separate 
project.

>  > Little defined? Excuse me? Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource and
>  > Wikibooks were set up basically ad hoc by a developer when they felt
>  > like there was enough interest. Wikimedia Commons was the first project
>  > with a proper project plan, and Wikinews was the only project ever
>  > launched by Wikimedia which went through fully developed discussion,
>  > definition and decision-making phases.

> Then why are both wikicommons and wikinews still envased in copyright 
> issues ?

"Envased" is not an English word, if you mean that both projects have 
lacked planning and foresight when it comes to copyright issues, then I 
would argue that the exact opposite is the case:
* Wikipedia violates its own license daily when content is copied from 
page to page or from wiki to wiki, and much of our use of the GFDL rests 
on often dubious interpretations
* Wikiquote's entire body of work consists of other people's words 
offered as "free content"
* Wikisource offers public domain content under the GFDL
* Wiktionary and Wikispecies deal with short pieces of data, yet have an 
overly complex license (which needs to be fully reproduced with each 
copy), covering content whose copyrightability itself is open to debate.

In the case of Wikinews, we had the foresight to know that neither the 
copyleft principle nor the complicated GFDL would necessarily be 
desirable, so we chose to put the content in the public domain, allowing 
us to easily make a decision about the license in the course of the 
project. After a careful deliberation process, we now know that the 
license we need (CC-WIKI-BY) doesn't even *exist* yet, so could not have 
been chosen at the time the project was started.

The Wikimedia Commons was defined by me initially as a repository of 
*free* content, with no exceptions for fair use or non-commercial use 
content, and this decision, too, has proven to be very beneficial to the 
project.

The community that has arisen on the Commons is probably more aware of 
copyright issues than any other, systematic tagging of all content has 
always been part of its policies, and in individual cases where the 
situation is unclear (e.g. the Stock.xchng photos), legally qualified 
people have guided the decision making process. People like Arnomane and 
Duesentrieb have done a tremendous job to add as much metadata to images 
as possible and to sort out copyvios.

That is not to say that everything is peachy -- the attribution from the 
Commons to projects using its media, a complex technical issue, needs to 
be resolved, as does the fair use issue on Wikinews. But generally, I 
would say that both projects have led the debate about copyright and 
licensing, informed by the experiences of the past.

Just because copyright on these two projects is talked about a lot 
doesn't mean that they have a lot of problems; in fact, it means that 
they have been the busiest *solving* problems, while there's been 
virtually no progress on the issues with our existing projects listed above.

All best,

Erik