[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

[Delirium]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>> a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed 
>
> > when I look into
>
> Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software 
> not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of 
> individual books.

While I still hope it will turn into something very useful, I do think 
writing full-fledged books is something that is much harder to do in a 
wiki-style form of collaboration, even with software changes.  Even on 
Wikipedia, the "broad overview" articles, with a few exceptions, tend to 
be at a much lower standard of quality than you might expect by looking 
at the more narrow articles below them in the hierarchy.  This is 
probably because it's just a lot harder to write a broad/synthesis 
article in a collaborative fashion---they don't lend themselves very 
well to division of labor and modularization, since their entire point 
is to do the big-picture thing.

This isn't to say that decent WikiBooks couldn't be written in a modular 
fashion, but a *great* book really needs someone to come by and 
integrate everything---a great textbook is a much different thing than 
15 stapled-together individually great chapters, which I think we're 
much better at doing.

-Mark