It would be good to have a page that attempts to answer the question and document some history. I have tried to keep abreast of the issues seeing some very interesting exchanges and debates with the questions largely remaining unanswered by those who should answer... a small part of me worries, given the amount of time Eric and Wayne have to give their projects, that WMF attentions and resources will want to go to wikieducator.. and that to me would be a disappointment. Most of us here work in WV with very little backing, so its even more remarkable to see where WV is on that note.
On 01/12/2009 8:04 PM, "Cormac Lawler" cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
2009/12/1 Leigh Blackall leighblackall@gmail.com
Can anyone here clarify what the relationship between the Wikimedia
Foundation and Wikieducator... Hi Leigh,
Wikieducator is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation - though there are close personal links. Wayne Mackintosh (Wikieducator founder) is on the advisory board of the WMF, and Erik Moeller (WMF deputy director) gives technical support (or something like that) to Wikieducator.
Wikiversity is a WMF project, and therefore hosted on its servers, and bound to its licensing conditions. Apart from that, the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and individual projects is slightly ambiguous - in general, the WMF does not intervene in project-level issues, and will support project initiatives on a case-by-case basis (and according to community support).
The article you linked to was associating Wikieducator with the Mediawiki software platform, rather than the Wikimedia Foundation. (These two often get confused!) However, as implied above, the lines here are often blurry; and, of course, many people are active on both sites ;-), and both sites have similar missions/scope. Furthermore, high profile collaborations between Wikieducator and WMF (such as successful funding bids) make their links more visible - whereas Wikiversity is within the WMF family, and is therefore implied in any funding that WMF receives.
(Do we need an educational resource on this issue? :-))
Cormac
_______________________________________________ Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
Well, to the Wikieduacator vs. Wikiversity issue I should say, that even it looks, they are having same aims, the way to fulfill these aims is much different. When on Wikieducator, they have started with the presentation/advertising of different schools, projects and learning groups, then continued with some educational resources for a real time education.
On the other side in Wikiversity, participants build up some courses and research projects. In the recent year or two English Wikiversity seems to me, that it hosting learning communities, to organize them a real time education, something like Moodle does.
I would say, that Wikiversity is still the experimental project, where schollars go to the depth and to the principals of e-learning and/or e-learning in the MediaWiki context or Wikimedia environment. So it is like a pilot project to this kind e-learning, while Wikieducator is more like based on known methods and ways of e-lerning. And of course, Wikieducater might in the future adopt, the Wikiversity way, as it has kind of small headquarters, while the headquarters for whole Wikiversity, is whole Wikiversity community - so this adoption or its velocity, will not be so fast in Wikiversity.
And of course it is a small project, so the technical development of Wikieduactor is much faster. When they realize they want to save pages to collection in PDF format, they go and implement the extension, while here on Wikiversity as part of a larger group or projects, we have to wait for global implementation or to the time, when developer do it. So that is one factor, which may slowdown the development of Wikiversity. And in general I would not suspect Wayne nor Eric to pay less attention to Wikiversity, because they are not taking care just of Wikiversity, but hundreds of other projects.
Just one interesting point from me to the end, doesn't to have to do nothing with all of that what was said before. Wikieducator was founded at the same time as Wikiversity was, while Wikiversity was in discussion for previous 3 years. So it may be possible that Mr. Mackintosh was inspired by Wikiversity.
Regards, Juan de Vojníkov
2009/12/1 Leigh Blackall leighblackall@gmail.com
It would be good to have a page that attempts to answer the question and document some history. I have tried to keep abreast of the issues seeing some very interesting exchanges and debates with the questions largely remaining unanswered by those who should answer... a small part of me worries, given the amount of time Eric and Wayne have to give their projects, that WMF attentions and resources will want to go to wikieducator.. and that to me would be a disappointment. Most of us here work in WV with very little backing, so its even more remarkable to see where WV is on that note.
On 01/12/2009 8:04 PM, "Cormac Lawler" cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
2009/12/1 Leigh Blackall leighblackall@gmail.com
Can anyone here clarify what the relationship between the Wikimedia
Foundation and Wikieducator... Hi Leigh,
Wikieducator is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation - though there are close personal links. Wayne Mackintosh (Wikieducator founder) is on the advisory board of the WMF, and Erik Moeller (WMF deputy director) gives technical support (or something like that) to Wikieducator.
Wikiversity is a WMF project, and therefore hosted on its servers, and bound to its licensing conditions. Apart from that, the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and individual projects is slightly ambiguous - in general, the WMF does not intervene in project-level issues, and will support project initiatives on a case-by-case basis (and according to community support).
The article you linked to was associating Wikieducator with the Mediawiki software platform, rather than the Wikimedia Foundation. (These two often get confused!) However, as implied above, the lines here are often blurry; and, of course, many people are active on both sites ;-), and both sites have similar missions/scope. Furthermore, high profile collaborations between Wikieducator and WMF (such as successful funding bids) make their links more visible - whereas Wikiversity is within the WMF family, and is therefore implied in any funding that WMF receives.
(Do we need an educational resource on this issue? :-))
Cormac
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org