[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

Wed May 11 16:44:52 UTC 2005

The wiki based development suffers a lack of cohesion. The purpose of 
many of the books is not very well defined, specifically the target 
audience and the guidelines on writing for that audience.

The FHSST project will develop only raw content on WikiBooks, then 
extract it all and edit it properly to produce a final book which can be 
printed. We'll put the final content back for the community but keep a 
fixed stable copy. The dynamic nature of the wikis also ensures that 
schools and governments will never have confidence in the quality of the 
content they would pull off one of the wikis, there is no reason to 
assume that someone hasn't maliciously modified the content and waving 
changelogs around isn't going to be very convincing.

My 2 cents worth.

Mark

Delirium wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> 
>>> a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed 
>>
>>
>> > when I look into
>>
>> Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software 
>> not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of 
>> individual books.
> 
> 
> While I still hope it will turn into something very useful, I do think 
> writing full-fledged books is something that is much harder to do in a 
> wiki-style form of collaboration, even with software changes.  Even on 
> Wikipedia, the "broad overview" articles, with a few exceptions, tend to 
> be at a much lower standard of quality than you might expect by looking 
> at the more narrow articles below them in the hierarchy.  This is 
> probably because it's just a lot harder to write a broad/synthesis 
> article in a collaborative fashion---they don't lend themselves very 
> well to division of labor and modularization, since their entire point 
> is to do the big-picture thing.
> 
> This isn't to say that decent WikiBooks couldn't be written in a modular 
> fashion, but a *great* book really needs someone to come by and 
> integrate everything---a great textbook is a much different thing than 
> 15 stapled-together individually great chapters, which I think we're 
> much better at doing.
> 
> -Mark
> 
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-- 
--
Mark Horner 

Jabber/AIM/Yahoo:   marknewlyn 

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

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