Dan Grey wrote:
At first, I agreed with Angela - protection is bad etc.
Then I read Aya's reasoning, and he has a point, doesn't he?
Wikiveristy has apparently failed to gain WM support, and hasn't exactly been flourishing.
Wikibooks is a project to collaboratively write free-content textbooks. To quote from What Wikibooks is not, which Angela restored this morning:
"Wikibooks is not a place for users to publish content unrelated to our main objective. In particular, Wikibooks may not be used as a personal homepage or online file storage. Users who want to use the wiki technology for other collaborative efforts should find a wiki hosting services such as [http://www.wikicities.com Wikicities], or install their own wiki software. For more information on how to set up the MediaWiki software, please read our book on [[Wiki Science]]."
So what possible justification is there for "Wikiversity" to freeload off Wikibooks?
Dan
The presence of Wikiversity and Wikijunior on Wikibooks is somewhat detrimental to Wikibooks in general, in the sense that it seems to encourage other people to come up with their own "pet projects" that they want to start and put them on Wikibooks. This has been a problem in the past on Meta where regular contributors to the Proposed Projects page have more often than not suggested that Wikibooks is a place to throw the project idea. This doesn't seem to be happening as much now, however.
The "announcement" by Anthere that Wikiversity was not a Wikimedia Foundation project just added fuel to the fire. See:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ARequests_for_new_languages#Requests_fo...
Yes, it hasn't been "officially sanctioned" by the Wikimedia Foundation to be put onto seperate servers yet (the German Wikiversity not withstanding), but it does seem to offer unique content that really doesn't fit into any currently existing Wikimedia project, including Wikibooks. And it is "official" in the sense that just about any major project on any server is official that doesn't have its own unique DNS lookup.
One of the huge problems with Wikiversity right now is that active discussions are going on in several places, including Textbook-l, Meta, Wikibooks, Wikipedia, and #wikimedia. These also seem to be very disjointed groups, each with their own goals. A very similar problem currently exists although to a smaller extent with Wikijunior. IMHO the discussion on meta needs to be terminated, particularly with "live" projects on another server. Unfortunately I don't have the political pull on meta to achieve that goal, and it doesn't seem likely to happen either. In particular this current issue between Angela and Aya is a demonstration of the conflict between the Wikibooks community and the rest of the Wikimedia community having a cultural clash, and that the discussions about Wikiversity have not been in a consistant community forum area. It takes somebody with agressive searching to find all of the relevant content about the role of Wikiversity on Wikibooks and what direction it should be taking. I know for a fact that I have not read all of it myself.
There are other issues with Wikiversity, and perhaps this whole issue is going to bring to light what the future of this project should be. Certainly Wikibooks is drifting away from the "pure textbook" philosophy that it started out as, and is becoming more of an original non-fiction book repository. This is even more so with some current actions by Wikipedia users moving content over to Wikibooks. This support role by Wikibooks to Wikiversity is all but gone now in the Wikibooks community.