Yes, we shouldn't worry about how messed up everything is. Let's just relax, stop making schools/departments/midget children, and work together as a community to come up with a name.
I believe what we currently call Departments we should call Schools (so there'd only be like 7-10 of them), and within these schools we'd have Departments in the form of subpages (e.g. School:Engineering and Technology/Audio Engineering). These departments would be responsible for lessons. And there'd be no deans but departmental advisors.
Portals and topic pages would be unrelated to this school scheme -- they'd be their own way of presenting topics.
Also, once we have a consensus on the name, we should have one individual responsible for the transition so there's no mayhem. I'd be more than happy to be the person.
Before we start working on a workable definition, should we put something in the Site Notice about how instead of making schools we should work out a reasonable definition, then link to relevant discussion?
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
James Hare wrote:
Currently, schools are part of departments, however departments can serve better as being part of schools. If that's the case, what should schools be part of?
I think the original idea behind schools was to have about five or six different schools that would hold all of the Wikiversity content. The problem was that there wasn't any firm policy set up to deal with letting these get out of hand, and every new contributor to Wikiversity it seemed decided to start their own school.
To keep this organized in even a semi-haphazard way, the "schools" were then grouped into departments just to try and put a sense of order to everything. That is why the situation seems to be reversed.
To really muck things up, when I started moving content over from Wikibooks to Wikiversity, I decided to switch the order of things (based on some IRC discussions about the topic where the other IRC participants seemed to have agreed. But not everything was renamed, so we are sort of half-way between the transition. In some ways I'm deliberately leaving this, so others can put in their $0.02 on the direction we should go, or if we should abandon the whole idea of schools and departments altogether.
BTW, some of the old Wikibooks "Schools" in turn have additional "departments", so there are other levels that need to be either "flatened" or somehow reorganized as well. I think it has been generally agreed upon that we are going to get rid of the "deans" of each school, and come up with some other organizational system.
-- Robert Scott Horning
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