On 7/20/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
In the past few days, I have been considering the three levels, data, information and knowledge. Most of our projects are actually providing "information". Wiktionary is rather providing "data". Wikibooks is sometimes providing "information" but it is sometimes wandering in "knowledge". Wikiversity will definitly entering the field of knowledge and this is what worried editors the most (the teaching part). Still, if I look well, the Foundation is claiming bringing knowledge. I see no reason why this project should not be started.
Ant
Thanks Anthere,
that's a really good way of putting it. The way I've always seen Wikiversity is that we are not simply providing information, but generating knowledge. That, after all, is what learning is all about. I would argue (and have done) that generating knowledge and learning is an incidental part of what we do as participants on any Wikimedia project - it's just that we make this an explicit aspect of Wikiversity.
To backtrack slightly, when we got going on the modified Wikiversity proposal, in the wake of the community vote and the board non-approval, we were at a loss to tie together the interests/needs of several in the community who wanted to teach courses, and the board's recommendation that we "exclude online courses". Our solution is to primarily host content, while also providing for learning communities/study groups around this content - networks/spaces for asking and answering questions, or posing and solving problems. However, I think in order to be sustainable, Wikiversity will need to put a primacy on its content, as was suggested by Daniel (Mav). We simply do not know how communities will work - this is an experimental side to Wikiversity, which could fail, though I anticipate it to be its central success :-)
However, to address your point, the bylaws http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws state that we develop and maintain "collections of documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages of the world". I wonder if this should not be changed to include "educational resources" (since this is what we do) - "information" just seems too narrow. It doesn't really (for me) encompass our better known ideal of "a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge".
What say ye?
Cormac