Anthere: This is a fair point, but I see no reason why the two should be confused, even if they happen within the same framework. As in real life, Wikilearners should be given the opportunity to choose a career path, whether it's theoretical or practical knowledge. I want to give people a choice: Whether a 15-year-old wikilearner participates in research on quantum computing or decides to pursue a career as a carpenter should be up to them, and a framework which allows both has an amazing potential. I don't think we need to set priorities for people, they will do so themselves based on their living conditions, needs and interests. Good question. I believe that Wikibooks will be one of many resources utilized by Wikisophia. Little defined? Excuse me? Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource and Wikibooks were set up basically ad hoc by a developer when they felt like there was enough interest. Wikimedia Commons was the first project with a proper project plan, and Wikinews was the only project ever launched by Wikimedia which went through fully developed discussion, definition and decision-making phases. There was a mailing list proposal, a refinement process you participated in, an FAQ, a mission statement, a policy thinktank page, a long discussion, and a demo site, before the project was finally set up. If this is "little defined", what is Wikispecies? If this is little defined, then why did you complain at the time that the project was defined *too much* in advance, and that guidelines should be removed from the proposal? I think Wikinews is the model Wikisophia should follow, with perhaps more time given to the technical needs evaluation. You are confusing a goal-oriented approach with hurry. There is no hurry. There is, however, a grants proposal to the World Bank in the works, and before we start seriously working on that, I'd like some basics to be settled. Erik

Anthere: I'm disinclined to agree with blanket statements like this, but the biggest problem I see with your logic is that you seem to assume that we have to model Wikisophia after traditional institutions if we combine research and teaching under "one roof", and that researchers also have to be teachers in such a framework. This is exactly the problem with the name "Wikiversity", it limits our thinking to what is there, when we are trying to create something fundamentally new. This is why I refuse to even use this name when discussing the project. I am not talking about a "wiki-university" here. In fact, what I would like to do is to really get to the bottom of these questions: What makes a good researcher? What makes a good teacher? How can we improve and assess people's ability to teach, or to research? How can we directly apply the latest results from didactical and pedagogical research to the teaching processes? How can we have meaningful feedback processes from learners to teachers to researches, and the other way? Certainly, the process of communicating knowledge to a larger group of people, whether in person or electronically, is always one which can have creative and surprising outcomes. I want to build a model where students can easily share ideas with people who are at the forefront of research, while being taught by those who have a proven ability to do so. We have to separate the discussion about *role selection* from the discussion about what roles should be allowed within a single project. Your analogy with "Current events" answers your own point: Research can begin as a section of Wikisophia, we can experiment with it, and we can assess how much sense it makes to develop this into its own separate project. "Envased" is not an English word, if you mean that both projects have lacked planning and foresight when it comes to copyright issues, then I would argue that the exact opposite is the case: * Wikipedia violates its own license daily when content is copied from page to page or from wiki to wiki, and much of our use of the GFDL rests on often dubious interpretations * Wikiquote's entire body of work consists of other people's words offered as "free content" * Wikisource offers public domain content under the GFDL * Wiktionary and Wikispecies deal with short pieces of data, yet have an overly complex license (which needs to be fully reproduced with each copy), covering content whose copyrightability itself is open to debate. In the case of Wikinews, we had the foresight to know that neither the copyleft principle nor the complicated GFDL would necessarily be desirable, so we chose to put the content in the public domain, allowing us to easily make a decision about the license in the course of the project. After a careful deliberation process, we now know that the license we need (CC-WIKI-BY) doesn't even *exist* yet, so could not have been chosen at the time the project was started. The Wikimedia Commons was defined by me initially as a repository of *free* content, with no exceptions for fair use or non-commercial use content, and this decision, too, has proven to be very beneficial to the project. The community that has arisen on the Commons is probably more aware of copyright issues than any other, systematic tagging of all content has always been part of its policies, and in individual cases where the situation is unclear (e.g. the Stock.xchng photos), legally qualified people have guided the decision making process. People like Arnomane and Duesentrieb have done a tremendous job to add as much metadata to images as possible and to sort out copyvios. That is not to say that everything is peachy -- the attribution from the Commons to projects using its media, a complex technical issue, needs to be resolved, as does the fair use issue on Wikinews. But generally, I would say that both projects have led the debate about copyright and licensing, informed by the experiences of the past. Just because copyright on these two projects is talked about a lot doesn't mean that they have a lot of problems; in fact, it means that they have been the busiest *solving* problems, while there's been virtually no progress on the issues with our existing projects listed above. All best, Erik

Delirium: A very reasonable question. When all you have is a hammer ... MediaWiki is great for textual content, decent for images, usable for other files. It is also getting good at structuring content in various ways (categories, RSS extension). Wikis in general are a powerful tool to develop simple workflows without having to write applications, e.g., I can create something like "Featured article candidates" or "Votes for deletion" from scratch without being a coder. This covers much of the content and the process side of Wikisophia, e.g. I can see how a certification model might be implemented using basic wiki pages. It does not cover some of the needs for publication (i.e. peer review), but this is something we're actively pursuing for Wikipedia already, and my intuition is that the solution (stable revision flagging) will very likely be similar. What MediaWiki does not cover is the very large and crucial area of systematic learning and assessment. Its interaction capabilities are also somewhat limited, though probably sufficient in the early stages of the project. This is an area that is currently staked out by modular learning management systems like [[Moodle]], which allow you to use many different pedagogical tools for any particular course. Consequently, we also lack support for standards in the eLearning field, most importantly probably [[SCORM]], which are currently used to exchange instruction files in the eLearning community. Obviously, this makes it very difficult to get people from that community involved. I am just at the beginning of the technical needs evaluation for Wikisophia, which will take several months at least. But my current belief is that we either need to interface with existing eLearning systems or, an approach which I generally prefer, add some of the desired functionality to MediaWiki (possibly as extensions) and turn it into a serious competitor for Moodle. I am strongly opposed to launching Wikisophia before its technical needs are fully evaluated and, to the extent which is necessary for the basic operation of the project, met. Erik

Erik Moeller wrote: You're right of course, and sometimes it would be quite understandable if it meant that Anthere wanted to see you stuffed in a vase. :-) Literally, the reference is to the feminine form of "vase", which is the sediment that builds up in a stagnant body of water. It becomes "enveser" or silted over. Figuratively, it becomes "stuck in the mud", or "mired". An interesting word! Ec

Erik Moeller wrote: Addressing the list in general: Wikiversity is a vastly larger and more ambitious project than anything launched before by Wikimedia. You have no incentive scheme for teachers besides monetary. You're a bunch of 20-something year old dreamers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and you expect large organisations to give you grants? Perhaps we have an advantage in that the rest of the world hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the people running Wikipedia were just lucky to discover a good idea early and enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and that the whole thing has been pulled off with near-zero managerial expertise or effort. They will cotton on, possibly after a failure or two. No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know, none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the tertiary level. It would be alright if this were a project like Wikipedia, where all we needed to do is write 2000 lines of code, strike a spark, and watch the whole thing roar into flame. But it's not. Wikipedia is mostly written by the huge pool of bored students with plenty of time on their hands. The vast bulk of them don't have the skills to teach at the tertiary level, and those that do are already paid for their time at an existing university. Of course there are people willing to teach for free, but they are greatly outnumbered by the people who want to learn for free. In short, there's no way to obtain an acceptable student-teacher ratio without paying teachers, and to pay teachers you need an administrative structure and managerial expertise. Sorry to be harsh, but it had to be said. I count myself in all statements about lack of collective skills. -- Tim Starling

On 5/11/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote: Wikiversity can, yes. That's what we've been saying all along. This is one area in which you're dead right. Think outside the box, people. There may be plenty of courses in which a facilitator plays a continual role, but there may not be in others. In any case, such a facilitator is going to play a very different role to that of my lecturer at university in the real world. The same argument could have been used when we set up Wikipedia - after all, the expectation then was that you needed each article in an encyclopedia to be written by academics and peer reviewed. They may indeed have that expectation, but that's where we need to show them that that expectation is wrong. A respository and idex of educational resources is Wikibooks. Careful dabbling in teacher/student interaction, actual courses, and potentially certification and original research is Wikiversity. This is why we define our projects before creating them, instead of creating great white elephants. -- ambi

Although I skipped everything she wrote above, I conquer with Elian on all the points she made. Why spread ourselves even thinner? Walter/Waerth

Elisabeth Bauer: Kennisnet may be interested in helping with that, I am in talks with the relevant people. I'm working on that. Headache. Personally, I never wanted Wikiquote to be a Wikimedia project. :-) Gerard and I have talked a bit about this; once we have a Wikidata prototype out in the wild, perhaps we'll be able to find funding to create a Wikidata schema for Wikispecies. I won't pat myself on the back too much, but I think we're doing well in terms of monitoring the progress of the international editions and highlighting successes and weaknesses. Yes. Please convert into static HTML ASAP. If nobody else feels up to the task, I'm willing to help. Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of individual books. A bit harsh; the coming language subdomain split is a good short term solution to encourage more translations (I don't think it's the best approach, but that's another story), which is probably the great potential of Wikisource. Yes, for the time being. Our existing projects should stabilize before Wikisophia is launched. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it or work on grant applications and cooperations which will benefit all our projects. Erik

The wiki based development suffers a lack of cohesion. The purpose of many of the books is not very well defined, specifically the target audience and the guidelines on writing for that audience. The FHSST project will develop only raw content on WikiBooks, then extract it all and edit it properly to produce a final book which can be printed. We'll put the final content back for the community but keep a fixed stable copy. The dynamic nature of the wikis also ensures that schools and governments will never have confidence in the quality of the content they would pull off one of the wikis, there is no reason to assume that someone hasn't maliciously modified the content and waving changelogs around isn't going to be very convincing. My 2 cents worth. Mark Delirium wrote: -- -- Mark Horner Jabber/AIM/Yahoo: marknewlyn Co-author: http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst "Life is but a seg-fault away ... Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"

Erik Moeller wrote: Yes of course. But in your original post on the matter you said, "I'd like to announce my intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to reflect the name change." This kind of comment announcing unilateral action is bound to rouse the community, and get them it completely distracted on the issue of the name. As much as I support the continued use of "Wikiversity" I realize that if and when it becomes a full fledged independent project it could do so with a different name. If your POV is that the new name should be "Wikisophia" just keep using it in your messages. If there is support for it others will start using it too. Presuming that it will be accepted is bound to stir passions. Ec

I agree with Tim. The project looks very vague to me. Plus there are already many people working on such things. For example, I am currently working with researchers in France on something that could be part of it: a tool to allow to adress consistency problems and evolution within wikis.

Fred Bauder wrote: [top post repaired] I meant the Wikiversity project, not all of Wikimedia. Only a handful of people have contributed to the Wikiversity pages on the wiki. No offence, but I didn't think you were one of them. -- Tim Starling