Erik Moeller wrote:
However, Wikisophia can certainly be defined in a way to match or exceed Wikinews in its ambitions.
Ambitions are easy to exceed. Results are more difficult to achieve.
So far, we have one rather successful encylopedia, a media repository which could use better organization, a dictionary which is in desperate need of software modifications, a quote collection with unsolved legal problems, a biology wiki which is boycotted by all wikipedian biologists I know, a news site whose participants are in the process of learning journalism (with very varying success if I look at the latest headlines of german wikinews), a dead memorial wiki for sep 11, a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed when I look into, and a source repository which duplicates the efforts of project gutenberg.
Isn't this enough to work on?
Jimbo often insists that Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a community, but sometimes it is important to remember that it is both. We are talking about thousands of volunteers motivated by a desire to share knowledge, innovating every single day in the ways this knowledge is structured, presented and distributed. This community, if it could be bought, would be worth billions of dollars. And it is growing every day.
Growing, yes. Each day new people arrive whom we have to teach our values and processes. More and more conflicts have to be resolved, new articles and changes have to be checked and fixed. "The community", defined as the dedicated group of people, knowing the way of the wiki and having expertise in an area, shouldn't be stretched to its limits.
The people who want a wikiversity have already a playground to develop concepts and produce something. So far, I haven't seen any results. If they develop something useful, fine, let's have a wikiversity. But until then I see no sense in this discussion.
Founding new projects can be a nice hobby, but I prefer working at and improving our existing ones.
greetings, elian