I want to raise an important (and very
frequently-asked) question: How
do Wikiversity and Wikibooks relate to eachother (and within this: do
they overlap unnecessarily, and how might they be aligned most
productively)? I'm asking this as an *international* question (ie as
it relates to present and future projects), although perhaps, in
asking this, we could ask: in what ways might different language
communities deal differently with these definitions and distinctions?
(And yes, I also realise this is several questions, and that there are
a few more to come. :-))
This is a question that does seem to come up too frequently still. While I think that it
is a good subject to try and tackle, I'd be skeptical that we would come to any firm
conclusions now that could be spread uniformly to all languages.
The idea about expanding Wikibooks to encompass what Wikiversity would have become is an
interesting one, although "wikiversity" sounds to me like more of a generalized
learning resource then "wikibooks" does. That is, I think it is more intuitive
that Wikiversity could be expanded to include textbooks then I do that Wikibooks could be
expanded to include all sorts of "learning resources".
The difference between the projects comes down to a division of the types of instructional
materials that are allowed at each project. Both wikiversity and wikibooks only allow
instructional materials, which sets them apart from nearly all other wikimedia projects.
The division is that wikibooks only allows instructional material that is
"book-like", while wikiversity allows more general forms of instructional
materals. From another perspective, Wikibooks is more rigidly structured, while
Wikiversity is more free-form. Both approaches have their own potential benefits. Trying
to expand Wikibooks to cover free-form materials loses some of the structure and
organization that is inherent to Wikibooks.
Once CentralAuth (Single-User Login) becomes a reality (if that ever happens) I think
there will be many more opportunities for synergy and collaboration between the two
projects. I think that in general, trying to expand Wikibooks to prevent the need for a
separate Wikiversity project is a bad idea and shortsighted. I also don't think
it's a good idea for different language projects to stray too far from one another in
their definitions, but then again there isn't enough communication between different
languages to help keep the projects synchronized. We don't have enough translators to
do anything like that.
--Whiteknight
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