2009/12/1 Leigh Blackall <leighblackall(a)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