[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

Wed May 11 07:09:09 UTC 2005

Erik Moeller wrote:

> However, Wikisophia can certainly be defined in a way to match or 
> exceed Wikinews in its ambitions.

Ambitions are easy to exceed. Results are more difficult to achieve.

So far, we have one rather successful encylopedia, a media repository
which could use better organization, a dictionary which is in desperate
need of software modifications, a quote collection with unsolved legal
problems, a biology wiki which is boycotted by all wikipedian biologists
I know, a news site whose participants are in the process of learning
journalism (with very varying success if I look at the latest headlines
of german wikinews), a dead memorial wiki for sep 11, a wiki for
developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed when I look
into, and a source repository which duplicates the efforts of project
gutenberg.

Isn't this enough to work on?

> Jimbo often insists that Wikipedia is first and foremost an
> encyclopedia, not a community, but sometimes it is important to
> remember that it is both. We are talking about thousands of
> volunteers motivated by a desire to share knowledge, innovating every
> single day in the ways this knowledge is structured, presented and
> distributed. This community, if it could be bought, would be worth
> billions of dollars. And it is growing every day.

Growing, yes. Each day new people arrive whom we have to teach our 
values and processes. More and more conflicts have to be resolved, new 
articles and changes have to be checked and fixed. "The community", 
defined as the dedicated group of people, knowing the way of the wiki 
and having expertise in an area, shouldn't be stretched to its limits.

The people who want a wikiversity have already a playground to develop 
concepts and produce something. So far, I haven't seen any results. If 
they develop something useful, fine, let's have a wikiversity. But until 
then I see no sense in this discussion.

Founding new projects can be a nice hobby, but I prefer working at and 
improving our existing ones.

greetings,
elian