Cormac Lawler wrote:
On 6/13/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
snip
It will be a serious damper on Wikiversity's community to routinely have groups showing up insisting local materials be relocated and deleted locally only to find out that the other projects have inappropriately modified the material or otherwise damaged their easy utility by newcomers to Wikiversity.
Not sure I understand this. If other projects, say, Wikibooks, made the material into a textbook from what was a collection of learning sheets, well, the learning sheets would surely be always kept at Wikiversity. If material was modified into a more advanced level, then the more basic version would be always retrievable from the history and forked into a new book. It's a wiki, right? Or have I completely misunderstood your point?
Yes you have completely misunderstood my point. All of the other wikis are attempting to converge on high quality reference works. They are all evolving organizational structures which create control points on access to the current and past versions of materials. Ultimately to meet their mission they must control what they serve to the public routinely. This will inevitably complicate their sites and organizational structures. Our wikiversity participants cannot reasonably be expected or required to learn an ever expanding constellation of virtual social spaces to access their learning materials in learning groups that will inevitably be more cross disciplinary than a standard physical learning environment.
All of them wish to capture markets and materials and levy outside influence or control upon the wikiversity learning environment and attract local users. There is a wide range of "buyin" activities which can be levied and undoubtedly all of them will be tried at some point or another.
Personally I do not think wikiversity will thrive if it puts up with this nonsense. Self motivated learners will not put up with this unless there is an overwhelming benefit available.
Initially there will be no overwhelming benefit because we will be learning what works. We will be lucky to provide sufficient benefit such that a few of the people who check us out can afford or wish to stick around and help us develop initial materials and environments.
The most likely result initially of material relocated to other wikis will be votes for deletion by other participants who do not like alien material coming in or feel it is not ready yet. Our newcomers arriving there will make neophyte mistakes and be likely to get slammed by poorly socialized adminstrater or uses that have not been integrated adequately into the local project. Wikiversity has no control of the quality of interaction on other sites yet our participants are required to experience this if we cannot have a local copy of a book or a article or a definition or an index list or a whatever.
Meanwhile wou nevermind.
Saying it is a wiki does change the way people interact in groups and with their environment. If people encounter too many obstacles or too much frustration from the initial environment they will leave and tell all their aquaintenances Wikiversity is a waste of time. It is extremely frustrating to have to go to a hostile foreign environment looking for materials you were told were located in a friendly local environment and then have to deal with the local know it alls who control the disposition and access to the materials.
In a few years when wikiversity can deliver high value for time expended our participants might put up with some of this. Initially it will be a large drain on retention of interest or belief in Wikiversities' viability.
In the virtual environment all other knowledge is only a click away and all other students can shift to and from the focus they are interested in. For example: This mean a group studying automobile modification for racing is likely at times to spread out and find all the factors involved say in designing a breakaway racing frame for the survivability of the driver:
If this band of neophytes finds that the previous classes materials have all be declared high quality and broken up and moved to eight different sites, four of which delivers the material with a smile, two of which require registration for download, one which flashes a request for donation and requires only for the next few days filling out a questionaire, and the fourth does not have the data up yet because it requires installation or upgrade of utilities such as for pdf or a proprietry graphics format but the data has not been shifted back by the poaching volunteer ..... multiply that by thousands of courses in varying states of development! Consider Wikipedia's retention rate of first time editor's measured by subsequent edits. I think it is in low single digits last time I checked. That is a single fairly carefree environment with the provision that initial edits are more likely to be reverted than those by veterans.
What is a Wikiversity newcomer likely to do when faced with a problem in one of four or five sites where class materials have been archived? I suspect a very high percentage will leave and likely not come back soon.
We need to plan for success and minimize local difficulties. It is fundamental in complex systems that clean well known interfaces which compartmentalize or encapsulate problems or critical action or products or services are required to get and keep them working well.
This insistence that Wikiversity be treated as a junior subordinate "partner" from which by policy any other wiki project participant can drop in and shout "good enough finally!" and demand relocation of the materials is designing in a huge group of unneccessary problems that will drain scarce resources from actual challenges that must be met and overcome for success.
Personally I think that the anticipated Wikiversity participants can be trusted to work with other projects to locate mature materials effectively. There should be no inflexible mandate built into the project ground rules. To establish an effective pleasant learning environment (the only kind that will prosper) the participants need maximum freedom with minimal effective core guidelines.
regards, lazyquasar
I think "minimal" is right - but I'm also continually aware that we need to provide the rationale to get Wikiversity going (btw, what do you think of the current proposal?). We also need (at some stage) to develop policies that will keep Wikiversity as stable as possible, avoiding the kind of fuss that the Wikibooks debate on 'gaming guides' (etc) has made. Still, Wikibooks has always had policies on its content (though, as this case shows, they needed to be be given further detail), and Wikiversity will have to do likewise - otherwise, there will continue to be uncertainty, and potentially end up with an intervention from Jimbo - which is far from ideal.
Intervention from Jimbo is the least of our problems or concerns. Why do you think he is slow rolling it? He has "god-king" control of a reasonable sane project once and only once at the moment at that is until he says go a head. The nonsense with the nazi books and the game programming guides is nothing but poor judgement or floating a balloon to see how much personal authority and appeal he still has or possibly served some other purpose. He is a fast learner will find different mistakes to make in the future.
You really think Jimbo is going to be dumb enough to show up and shout no original research!!!! if a P'hd is showing a few interested students how neurons works by comparing his current results with published results elsewhere? When it starts to resemble an active lab journal in progress with 30 active neophytes running around doing something useful while watching an actual groundbreaking paper be polished prior to formal submittal to peer reviewed journal what do you think a healthy reaction from the wikiversity at large will be when somebody from another project shouts "no original reseach!!!" then deletes all copies using his stewardship account derived from Wikipedia?
Consider computer software. Are we to tell students they cannot publish code snippets locally under the FDL or GPL to look over because it is orginal material and can be potentially patented?
There are thousands of such issues that will be faced by a general public learning facility and solutions will have to be generated locally based upon what appears useful to the current participants.
As I have stated before wikiversity should not be a place to tell others what they cannot do to establish learning capabilities. The local participants can be trust to shout no no! at any fringe or questionable groups show up with shady or dubious purposes.
You asked what I thought. I already told you six weeks ago I thought the proposal was as ready as it could for submittal.
I saw a few minor changes I disagree with. You are familar with my opinion of hardcoding cozying up to the other projects methods at the onset to ease the political problem of approval. It is buying a whole lot of hassle in the future and it is unnecessary.
The foundation mailing list is continuing to yack yack about their quality control problems and possible approaches to improvement. It will not escape the savvy there that education must be a component of an overall approach to improvement and maintenance as in the long term it is the only approach that help get thing correct in the first place.
Has the committee had a vote yet on when to submit the URL to the revised proposal?
Is there a firm date upon which the committee will have an initial vote upon whether they should schedule a vote on whether to submit?
Is there an active agenda or tasklist which details what the committee's group savvy has determined must be completed before a decision can be made on scheduling a series of votes upon when to review the current task and discrepancy lists and suspenses?
Let me pose you a different perspective. What happens when a newly arriving group forks a wikibook so they part it out in pieces for individuals who will not initially understand the material to review and begin researching so they can prepare lists of questions, charts, animated illustrations, topical papers, lists of online links to more in depth materials, list of online links to primer materials, google search for solution or discussion of the examples or homework problems provides, check the math of the examples, prepare a phonic vocabulary list and glossary of key terms, do a high school class term paper on a key concept or subject, and fifteen other bizarre activities a couple of them have aggreed might be useful to experiment with for pedagogical purposes ...... and the whole group starts at chapter one a few weeks later, spends a couple of weeks studying chapter one with each other and editing the forked wikibook ..... this goes on for eight months and another smaller group is emulating this practice starting at the beginning.
After two years enough is enough. The original three authors at wikibooks become aware of this and when the "current participants of the learning trail" refuse to drop everything and merge not replace back into the original wikibook and delete the "forked" book from wikiversity because of the wasted 50cents worth of hard drive and "duplication of effort" the students fire back a few catcalls and return to their studies. One of the original authors decides this is in violation of wikilove as codified in the wikiversity charter and takes the issue the newly formed Wikimedia Wide Arbcom. The arbcom agrees with the author but the students continue studying and ignoring these extraneous irritants. The highly respected (within some wiki cliqui or community) demands action!!!
How does your committee of proposal designers propose to address the above or similar issues you are inviting by going along with the idiotic contention that there can be only one copy for multiple purposes within the Wikimedia panarama of online volunteer activities?
Should wikiversity establish adequate funding, infrastructure, and value to the online world at large how would you propose to deal with something similar twenty times a year?
When the students get tired of top down and sidewise bureacracy and stage a publicity drive to encourage the donating public to stop and request a hearing from all large grant organization to pitch their case for a fifth fork to try to get it right ...... who should we have make the counter presentations? The Wikimedia Foundation Board? The Wikiversity Board of Regents? Ten volunteers from the honorary elected "Department Heads"?
We want a self organizing and regenerating community, not a series of hassles with external groups or forces with their own interests at stake. A library or encyclopedia is a very different animal from a wikiversity (all online pedagogical methods and students welcome).
I have said it before: If the Wikimedia Foundation does not want the hassle or expense of providing useful reliable robust friendly infrastructure for a viable Wikiversity then we should organize a non profit and establish our own infrastructure. It would be better to start within the existing wiki community ..... access to wiki knowledgeable participants, instant infrastructure, etc but if external forces insist on regulatory access to Wikiversity participants efforts then I think we are wasting our time. People get enough of that hassle in physical environments. They are not going to seek out Wikiversity and help it thrive if the nonsense thresholds get to high.
Try it another way. What is the big deal from wikibooks being hosted at Wikiversity that doe no meet Wikibooks criteria somehow or forked wikibooks being modified and used locally? The entire rest of the planet is authorized to fork a book from wikibooks and modify as long as they insert a pointer back to the origin at Wikibooks. Are they afraid that the various professors around the web who have started posting FDL'ed textbook on university or other web space might relocate in mass to Wikiversity instead of Wikibooks? If so then they obviously have problems that need to be fixed. If I was a prof or class with a draft book ready to go faced with this situation I would be tempted to first place the draft book at Wikiversity and encourage as much use and feedback as possible and then place the more mature product at Wikibooks under their obviously soon to arrive configuration management system. Get the best of both worlds. A stable mature product web accessible to passive readers and an actively reviewed and improve draft which can be periodically proofed and a next edition placed in the premier spot at wikibooks. So why the concern from an online library that an online university will establish its own library rather than deal with them? Suppose we call them Wikiversity's library ..... why do they insist no other copies of books can exist on campus? Do they want our participants highlighting or editing their proof copies that are presented to the world? Wikipedia has that and they are finding they have a severe configuration management problem which must be addressed somehow if they are to move from the existing quality plateau to the next.
Take another case: Term papers or research papers. Eventually a popular subject has groups of aproximately 5 moving through the learning trail approximately every 3 months with some overlap. Each participant is given the opportunity to write a paper and two or three of each five do. About half are high quality while the other half are valiant efforts. After three or four years Wikiversity has a file on this subject of 5X3X4/2 of thirty papers .... fifteen high quality to mediocre and fifteen mediocre ranging downward to poor.
Perhaps this is a growing trend and files are being established in multiple increaing subjects as high schoolers and masters degree researchers arrive for occasional use of Wikiversity assets.
It comes to Wikipedia's attention that this material is not being merged back into Wikipedia and the Wikiversity participants have increasingly started consulting the files. Wikipedia is losing some correctional proofing from these high quality candidate users and worse losing a big part of their neophyte recruitment pool or "new blood" that helps the project maintain its high quality and funding donations. Someone insists that "Wikiversity is not an Encyclopedia" and that these poor (in comparision to Wikipedia article on same subject) topical papers should be deleted so vulnerable students are not exposed to poor material but move on or back to Wikipedia's high grade single page integration and explanation of the entire topic.
Sure enough ... right there in the approved project proposal or charter is the promise to the Wikimedia Foundation that: "Wikiversity is not an Encyclopedia". Two members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board insist that all term papers must be deleted or restricted somehow from the public, only merging Wikipedia editors should have access to a topical paper published at Wikiversity as of two years after its final publishing date. Seven others of the expanded board roll their eyes and cannot be reached for comment. The Wikiversity Board of Regents has been stacked by experienced Wikipedians or Wikimedians who think Wikiversity as the junior partner project must appease cash cow senior Wikipeda.
So .... who or where should this kind of mess be arbitrated? This kind of crap is exactly what we are inviting with the committe's current proposal which is getting lengthier with each edit.
So ... turn it in if it cannot be minimalized to retain maximal future freedom of action and lets get started.
What the hell are we waiting for? Nobody except the committee has tweeked the online presentation or documentation for months. Let's try something, in permaent project wiki space so we can attract participants and start growing communities and intellectual property assets and find out what works.
Stability. We are so far from stability being an issue it is laughable. We will be lucky to find techniques that work well to establsh stable zones ..... local group working guidelines that have stabilized well enough to publish and adopt as inital standard procedures. A wikiversity is a complex place compared to an encyclopedia or a book shelf.
How are we going to enforce local mandates that safety materials must be absorbed and some sort of screening passed to get the chemistry lab section or the GPL'ed DNC data or the design software for alcohol/lox rockets? Are we? Is it appropriate? Is it responsible enough not to? Are we restricted to just pointing at the above types of information to other web sites with appropriate local controls or if such cannot be found or established at least shifting the legal liability?
If we refuse to implement any kind of reasonable local controls do we lose access to the knowledgeable professionals in that field who think wildcatting is too dangerous when dealing with .... cell biology, nuclear physics, earth moving equipment, food preparation, bathroom cleaning, etc.?
We can publish the best and file the rest for future reference or even toss or transfer it as local consensus advises or dictates if we ever attract particpants. Without participants we are wasting our time trying to write policy.
A project proposal is sufficient information to get started. Not a detailed pre design before any knowledge particpants or detailed designers show up. That is true in "stable" field of endeaver such as engineering sewage facilities.
If the Board is requiring detailed policy from your committee before we can get started finding out what works it is a sign of their incompetence or hostility to the project and we may as well get a firm no and move on.
If they want budgeting estimates or contingency plans that is a different issue.
If they give us detailed feedback instead this "no online class" crap then we can generate what is needed to explain how we intend to proceed or get started. "No online classes" is an unenforceable requirement that will be ignored by most of our participants. Groups interacting always find it useful to have a scope, schedule, known task lists, etc. etc. What can you call that but a class? When a random group finds a mentor and asks him to take the lead what is that but an instructor? BTW Budget estimates and contingency plans are seldom put into mission statements. It is rarely a good idea and it always pisses of a project team to be handed a failure mode from above or the customer. The results are seldom pretty.
If they throw standard project management shit back you informally .... scope, budget, schedule .... Remind them Wikiversity is an experimental project and orginal research. We are not proposing to build toasters. We have a lot of flexibility in we proceed if they are legitimately concerned about our resource consumption impacting other projects. Legitimate means they have detailed information to provide we which can analyze to produce solutions.
Consider the kneejerk "No original research". That was put into effect because it was appropriate for an encyclopedia and a dictionary or thesaurus. For them it is brilliant policy ... it makes it easy to deal with the fringe and POV people who show up claiming divine inspiration or alien toasters inscribed on invisible pyramids. It makes zero sense for a broad center of learning or a simple repository of orginal materials for the educational field. People learning things have plans to use the knowledge and they are often creative people. This means original results are inevitable and there must be a way to manage it through our organization or it will create large problems.
What the the hell. Bring it on. We can always dig in or fork as appropriate.
See if all the above crap and the "proposal" debates were on our own wiki at stable URLs we could be marking it up and revising and revoting every someone showed up to make them feel important and recruiting.
We might have a viable experiment evolving into something that could show us what will work for a Wikiversity. Instead we have a committee and designated troll and possibly a few editors wandering around the barren link maze at Wikibooks.
If the powers that be send back some comments when you submit or present our proposal point out to them the efficiencies of working in our own wiki with stable URLs so there is not a bunch of rework migrating the materials and we are no longer cluttering meta and wikibooks. Point out that in the event the project is determined non viable locally this clean approach will make it possible to easily back up the data for possible future sale to the forks or simply a clean delete.
Simple pay me now or later proposition. Admin wiki setup time now, clean backup and delete later or a screwed mess at Wikibooks and Meta with an arduous cleanup later. When they respond we already have the screwed up mess point out the transfers and cleanup could be made by project proponents while they continue to stall. Our advantage is we have chance to attract our early participants back to assist with the fork. You would be amazed at much more synergy, expertise, contacts, etc. a group of tens people can generate over single digits.
regards, lazyquasar