Despite claims to the contrary, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity was certainly _not_ protected at the advice of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Perhaps it was advised by one member of that foundation, but other Board members were not consulted. I am disgusted this approach would be taken with no consensus from the community.
Wikiversity has been running for a long time on Wikibooks and I see no agreement whatsoever for it to be suddenly shut down like this.
Protection is a defense against vandalism, not a way of expressing one person's point of view on whether or not a sub-project of Wikibooks should exist. Please remove the misleading statements about protection and explain why you ever thought the Foundation would propose such an awful measure on a popular set of pages like Wikiversity.
Angela.
Angela wrote:
Despite claims to the contrary, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity was certainly _not_ protected at the advice of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Calm down a moment. Instead of posting here on Foundation-l, perhaps a more modest commentary on [[b:Staff Lounge]] would be better? Certainly on the talk page of Aya? I know you think Aya is going overboard a little bit on Wikibooks, but I think it is more a part of education than trying to kill this new admin. I do see that you put some commentary on the talk page for Wikiversity, but there could be a little bit more within the Wikibooks community.
Aya has been getting a considerable amount of advise via IRC on #wikimedia, and I think some of that advise may not be as good as it should be. Before you blow you stack, lets try to solve this problem a little more calmly. I also don't see much on Wikiversity that is pressing to be changed at the moment besides the commentary that you are complaining about.
Aya has been trying to reorganize some of the Wikibooks policy pages and cleaning out some cruft that has been laying about Wikibooks for some time. I think that going after Wikiversity may be too far, but again Wikiversity has not exactly been progressing that far either. I'm going to try and get Aya's viewpoint on this issue.
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
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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.
Angela wrote:
Despite claims to the contrary, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity was certainly _not_ protected at the advice of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Perhaps it was advised by one member of that foundation, but other Board members were not consulted. I am disgusted this approach would be taken with no consensus from the community.
Wikiversity has been running for a long time on Wikibooks and I see no agreement whatsoever for it to be suddenly shut down like this.
Protection is a defense against vandalism, not a way of expressing one person's point of view on whether or not a sub-project of Wikibooks should exist. Please remove the misleading statements about protection and explain why you ever thought the Foundation would propose such an awful measure on a popular set of pages like Wikiversity.
Angela.
The following is a formal reply from Aya about this issue:
After having put some more thought into this, I would say that my protecting the page was the wrong thing to do in this case, since, although I feel that knowingly using Wikibooks as a free content-provider to host texts which are not part of the Wikibooks project (Wikimania05 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05 is another example), are tantamount to vandalism, there should be some formal clarification. I will not do it again, and I strongly recommend that others do not, until we have some sort of official Wikibooks:Vandalism policy http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks:Vandalism_policy&action=edit, which states when page protecting and IP/account blocking are justified. The correct action would have been to mark it as a VfD, but I didn't really want it all to be deleted, since a lot of work has gone into it already, and it seems a shame to delete it all. I shall start work on such a policy when time permits. - Aya http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Aya ^T http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Aya C http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Aya 16:43, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
I'll let him speak for himself. I'm just relaying this because Aya is not on this mailing list.
I aqm an Italian fellow ana I live in Italy , Salutami a sorata ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Scott Horning" robert_horning@netzero.net To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 10:45 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity
Angela wrote:
Despite claims to the contrary, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity was certainly _not_ protected at the advice of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Perhaps it was advised by one member of that foundation, but other Board members were not consulted. I am disgusted this approach would be taken with no consensus from the community.
Wikiversity has been running for a long time on Wikibooks and I see no agreement whatsoever for it to be suddenly shut down like this.
Protection is a defense against vandalism, not a way of expressing one person's point of view on whether or not a sub-project of Wikibooks should exist. Please remove the misleading statements about protection and explain why you ever thought the Foundation would propose such an awful measure on a popular set of pages like Wikiversity.
Angela.
The following is a formal reply from Aya about this issue:
After having put some more thought into this, I would say that my protecting the page was the wrong thing to do in this case, since, although I feel that knowingly using Wikibooks as a free content-provider to host texts which are not part of the Wikibooks project (Wikimania05 <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05> is another example), are tantamount to vandalism, there should be some formal clarification. I will not do it again, and I strongly recommend that others do not, until we have some sort of official Wikibooks:Vandalism policy
http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks:Vandalism_policy&action =edit,
which states when page protecting and IP/account blocking are justified. The correct action would have been to mark it as a VfD, but I didn't really want it all to be deleted, since a lot of work has gone into it already, and it seems a shame to delete it all. I shall start work on such a policy when time permits. - Aya <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Aya> ^T <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Aya> C <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Aya> 16:43, 4August 2005 (UTC)
I'll let him speak for himself. I'm just relaying this because Aya is not on this mailing list.
-- Robert Scott Horning
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