On 6/13/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
Regarding Wikiversity .... there are still some of us advocating that Wikiversity be a standalone project for developing and delivering educational materials of all kinds. When a textbook is ready for Wikibooks or a multimedia animation is ready for wikicommons then the participants at Wikiversity can be trusted to migrate the materials if it is appropriate.
Absolutely. I hope Wikiversity will be able to complement other Wikimedia projects, and that participants of both/all projects work out ways of sharing (possibly even slightly overlapping content) between projects. But I'm not sure what you mean exactly here - I personally think Wikiversity shouldn't be developing an encyclopedia, a collection of textbooks, a media repository etc _on Wikiversity itself_ - does that mean that, in your eyes, I'm arguing for a Wikiversity which *won't* be a "standalone project for developing and delivering educational materials of all kinds"?
It should not be dictated by outsiders to Wikiversity participants what materials they can control in their own project space for maximun educational efficiency.
I certainly wouldn't want that to happen. That's why I'm trying to develop as broad a scope for the project as possible, while still giving it a clear focus and rationale (ie. to combat the argument: "keep Wikiversity at Wikibooks").
The typical argument concerns duplication of data on hard drives and duplication of effort. Regarding the first I hope we can ignore it given Moore's law, the current price of hard drives and the liklihood that Wikiversity will be approved in two or three decades. Regarding the second, writing, studying and wikis are all about duplicated efforts and integration/separation of the same.
I don't know to what extent of shared content you're arguing for here - I agree that it'll probably be a bit messy, but I still think that we should be encouraging people to build materials where they're most likely to survive. In my mind, at least, Wikiversity will be a hub for learning, which could then be consolidated by creating content for other projects.
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?
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.
Regards, Cormac