2009/12/1 Leigh Blackall leighblackall@gmail.com

Can anyone here clarify what the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikieducator is? And where Wikiversity stands in that relationship?

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19276

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