On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 12:41 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 March 2010 17:16, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 March 2010 16:33, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2010/3/18 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
For what it's worth, I think it's probably a good idea to shut down Wikiversity. Wikiversity hasn't to my knowledge achieved anything of
note.
To be fair, I don't think that's equally true for all language editions. The German Wikiversity, from what I can see, seems to be slowly but productively doing what the project was designed to do: producing learning materials.
Wikiversity was set up to do *two* things: produce learning materials, and support learning/research activities and communities. The second question was always more vaguely defined, but was always the more interesting question for me. English Wikiversity's problems stem from an uncertainty about what a legitimate learning/research activity would be, and a consequent uncertainty in Wikiversity's scope as a project. Dealing with the question of what someone is free to learn in Wikiversity is the useful course of action to take here; rather than talk of closing the project. Unfortunately, due to imminent submission of my thesis, I have no time to give this for the next two weeks, but will get back to the discussion thereafter.
Cormac
Well we could put in place a mechanism for creating open access journals then tell those in the open source community involved in the dwm mess to use it. Heh or start the journal of [citation needed] aka stuff wikipedians know but haven't been able to find a source for.
-- geni
Heh... "The Journal of Citation Needed" sounds more like a potential blog than a journal, but I like it nonetheless :) Reference librarians tend to use email lists for this sort of thing -- there are several specialized and general lists for posting and answering hard questions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stumpers-L is the most famous). Maybe we need something similar :)
Re: Wikiversity -- it's worth nothing that PrivateMusings was told to please quit it as early as mid-January by at least a couple of people [see his enwp talk page], so the deletion of the Wikiversity page didn't totally come out of the blue. Also PM posted a clarification to the Signpost story that I wrote on my en.wp talk page, in which he writes that no experiment was planned but only a few were written up "in a very small way".
I suspect few of us have access to the deleted page to see for ourselves, though personally it's hard for me to imagine someone -- anyone -- coming from the English Wikipedia and choosing such a topic to write about in the first place without at least having the intent to be provocative. How much intent does it take to become a troll? More broadly, I think the global principle of "don't take your fight to other projects" (x-project or x-language) is a good one, and we should adopt and enforce it, but I don't know if that includes global blocking.
-- phoebe