tl;dr: I support closure of BWV and all WVs. Rationale below.
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While I totally agree with the closure (and I have provided quite a solid reasoning for that in relevant eternal RFC on Meta [1] which should be reminded here as well), I would prefer if wording like "attract lunatics" (despite I have the same feeling and although obviously meant as hyperbole) could be avoided to prevent further heating of the discussion. WV users tend to put themselves in position of victims of incomprehension and derision which motivates other uninvolved users to rather support the WV existence just for balancing the situation and helping the "victims".
Despite not being the LangCom member I totally agree with the Beta Wikiversity closure.
My position in this is actually yet more strict: I think that during the time of its existence the project - unlike other projects - did not prove its viability and value to be worth to be treated as separated project. (Note for those who don't remember it or don't know the history - in a nutshell Wikiversity was originally part of Wikibooks, but then it spinned off.)
There are only 15 Wikiversities after more than 11 years of its existence. Compare to 18 Wikivoyages (2nd lowest count) after slightly more than 4 years or 33 Wikinewses (3rd lowest count) after nearly 12,5 years.
I think that for this particular project it is worth to not "shatter forces" (as we say in Czech, (~= to not split the effort)) and go further with the closure - to move all existing domains back under Wikibooks, assuming typically using new namespaces for that.
I also think, that at least there should be some evaluation of all 15 existing subdomains done to prove if they are alive (= not only maintenance edits, but also significant new content in recent time of say half a year, also reasonable number of active editors) and if they stick to the project description - I know about pages being totally out of scope of not only Wikiversity, but any WMF project, but kept on Wikiversity using the eternal argument "Wikiversity is different from other WMF projects and supports everything what could be useful for education" [read: you can write there nearly literally everything, because you can always pronounce it having a potential for education and it won't be deleted].
But this evaluation or even closure/move of (all) subprojects is further action. I just mentioned that as another supportive argument for why Beta Wikiversity should be closed (it also contains some out of scope stuff).
Going further and accepting the statement that no new Wikiversities should be created in favour of having them rahter stay in Wikibooks, the Beta WV content then could be imported to existing Wikibooks instead of Incubator (IIANM, there is no language in Beta WV which wouldn't have its own Wikibooks, and in case that yes, then Wb/<code> on Incubator can be used).
Note: Beta WV also contains some cross-wiki stuff which should be in case of its closure imported to Meta (not to Incubator which is not intended for such stuff (in favour of Meta) besides it does not have environment set for that) as the cross-project & cross-lingual communication hub.
One technical argument: Similar to known and often mentioned fact that MediaWiki isn't the best solution for the purpose of effective media storage (Commons), MediaWiki is also not effective software for online interactive education (uninteractive is covered by Wikibooks) and there are much better platforms for that even some allowing the free content.
Speaking of which brings to the attention that unlike all other WMF projects which (in a nutshell) create static (as opposite to interactive in this case) consumable content built by users *together*, Wikiversity wants/tends to be interactive project (on teacher-student basis) as well as that because of the principle of that there is less cooperative approach to build pages (ie. ownership of pages-student's (home)works etc.) which seems to me to be against basic principles of WMF projects.
Last but not least: There was also a proposal from some Wikiversity users to move Wikiversity under different legal body (= it would not be ran by WMF anymore) because "they don't feel that they and the project are treated as well and supportive as they should be", but I am not able to find that mention ATM.
Apologies for a bit longer email, but I think that for this particular case (considering the evolution of the RFC [1]) it is worth to have solid basis and arguments, so I wanted to provide you guys some you can use as well as further thoughts for future. Hope you find it useful.
Kind regards
Danny B.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against the general *existence* of Wikiversity as the online free education resource, but I believe that the current setup (running it on MW and under WMF while claiming and insisting on being different) is not good solution.
Wikiversity has been proved to attract lunatics and Beta Wikiversity has it's shiny role there. So, I think they proved not to be able to take care about nurturing the new projects (unlike Wikisource); at least not without the Incubator admins.
In other words, I would go with closure. What do you think?
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