[Foundation-l] Wikibooks texts and Wikiversity

Tue Aug 15 20:37:56 UTC 2006

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>Amgine wrote:
>  
>
>>A comment in IRC yesterday raised a concern for me which I would like  
>>to see addressed.
>>
>>Cormac mentioned that he and Mr Horning had discussed moving  
>>textbooks and curricula from en.Wikibooks to en.Wikiversity. He was  
>>unsure if this meant the textbooks would be deleted from  
>>en.Wikibooks, but he was sure any contributors who preferred working  
>>on en.Wikibooks would be able to copy them back to that project.
>>
>>This seems extremely odd to me, that deleting a textbook from  
>>Wikibooks would even be contemplated. Educational materials are,  
>>after all, the mission of the project. And dividing a textbook  
>>between projects seems to be forking, both of the book in question  
>>and the potential contributors as well, again something which should  
>>not even be contemplated in my opinion.
>>
>>Could the Wikiversity project please clarify this?
>>
>>Amgine
>>    
>>
>We are not talking about moving the textbooks from Wikibooks, but rather 
>just about everything that is in the "Wikiversity" psuedonamespace on 
>Wikibooks, and some of the content on Wikibooks that is more for 
>organization and teaching of Wikiversity courses that is not strictly a 
>textbook, per se.  We are not in any way trying to fork Wikibooks in 
>this respect, but rather trying to make a distinction between the two 
>projects.
>
>Much of this is likely to be dealt with in the VfD pages of Wikibooks, 
>as Wikibooks admins try to come to a grip with what Wikiversity content 
>is successfully moved to the new Wikiversity site and what is to be left 
>behind.  And as with much of Wikibooks content that has been added over 
>the years, there is some that has been added and will be added that 
>really does need to be on other projects and will be done through a 
>normal transwiki.  Wikiversity content will be no different in this context.
>
>I guess in this regard, this is essentially as if the VfD for 
>Wikiversity is finally successful, but the transwiki is finally taking 
>place today.  It will take some time to deal with the fine details, however.
>
I can't see why people are in such a hurry to dump this stuff onto 
Wikiversity.  Wikibooks has rightly complained before when Wikipedia 
editors dumped material on Wikibooks just to get rid of it.  It would 
probably be advisable to at least wait until Wikiversity is out of Beta 
before doing this.  The Wikiversity community still needs to build its 
core before having to devote a lot of time coping with data dumps.

Ec