[Foundation-l] Wikiversity

[Robert Scott Horning]

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.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning