(Cross-posted on [[m:Talk:Wikiversity]] and briefly summarized on de.wikiversity.org)
During and after our visit to the free software conference in South Africa, Angela and I talked a lot about the Wikiversity project, and the potential Wikimedia has to develop a truly global, free institution of learning as a new project.
As you probably know, these discussions are currently focused on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity and the talk page.
Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not going to push this until we have the server situation under control and the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's one issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the project.
Angela, Jimbo, Daniel Mayer and I agree that the name Wikiversity is problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties, degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.
I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established people of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic university, this doesn't belong here."
Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently owned by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the Greek sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the area of learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not limit the project very early in its nature or scope.
Peter is willing to give us the name if we push WikiTeX a little to get it security-reviewed and installed on our servers, which seems like a fair deal to us.
So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to reflect the name change. This does not affect the existing efforts under the Wikibooks domain which use the "Wikiversity" label, but only any potential future eLearning/eTeaching project we intend to pursue. de.wikiversity.org could be renamed and moved to the new domain once it is owned by Wikimedia.
Thoughts and comments are welcome. Hopefully, we can find a consensus on this without needing a vote.
All best,
Erik