On 6/20/06, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Absolutely not - Wikiversity will not seek to
undermine or dilute the
effort or material on Wikibooks. Instead, I would see the material as
potentially overlapping with eachother, but formatted differently - in
textbook form on Wikibooks, and broken down into learning activities
on Wikibooks, which could be used by teachers as stand-alone lessons.
Some material will be duplicated, but the mission of Wikiversity is
not to duplicate this material unnecessarily - indeed, to promote the
development of further material on other projects if that is a more
appropriate place for it.
I think it makes sense to imagine, for a moment, that Wikibooks didn't
exist, and that we started out with Wikiversity. It would be a place
where people collaborate on all kinds of educational resources and the
structure around them. As very different work methodologies emerge, it
makes sense to split away groups into their own projects, as was done
with Wikipedia=>Wiktionary, etc.
In the case of Wikiversity, we just have the process backwards.
Wikibooks is a subset of the larger goal "educational resources". But
it's only one of them. There may be other projects that split away
from Wikiversity (while remaining associated with it). I could imagine
the Research part being situated in its own wiki, the eLearning part,
etc.
While having a community in a single wiki can lead to interesting
synergies, in the end, if we have single login and some other
cross-wiki tools (which we need anyway), whether something is an
independent wiki or a single big place shouldn't make that much of a
difference. Indeed, it shouldn't even make much of a difference if it
is a Wikimedia wiki or not, as long as it is free content.
Incidentally, there is an existing effort to create eLearning
materials using a wiki at:
http://wikieducator.org/
Depending on how it turns out, it make make sense to integrate it one
way or another. The same is true for the Austrian Wikiversity. The
important thing is that we form a network of free content platforms
for collaboration among educators.
The tricky question for me is what to do with how-tos. I think they do
have a place in Wikimedia, and a separate project for them might be a
good idea. This could include gaming walkthroughs -- instructional
materials of any kind. But my biggest hope is for documents from the
open source community to be migrated into the wiki context. There are
thousands of FAQs, HOWTOs and man pages which are still maintained by
single individuals. I made a small effort to change this with
OpenFacts, but this was in 2002, when many of the relevant people were
still convinced that the future was in using a strict workflow
approach within a CMS.
Erik