[Foundation-l] Wikiversity

[James Hare]

I don't know if it's a matter for NPOV, because I believe we've questioned
if NPOV is an appropriate policy for Wikiversity. The hard part is finding
an apt variant.

Wikiversity should be based on research projects by contributors, with the
end product of instruction material and possibly an accompanying wikibook.
That's the plan of "Bibliography and Research Methods" -- it'll start off as
research on how to appropriately do research, then once we get the idea of
what the answer is, we'll put together instruction material.

On 8/15/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/16/06, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> > James Hare wrote:
> > > We can develop Creationism instruction material as well as Science
> > > instruction material, can't we? As long as we have interested parties?
> >
> > How about someone creating instruction material which teaches the
> > superiority of the aryan race? Or schoolbooks in turkish which explain
> > that there was never such thing as an armenian genocide? Where's the
> border?
> >
> > In my western ignorant mindframe I'd say that we need a common ethical
> > ground for those projects to which NPOV doesn't and can't apply.
>
> None of the examples you cite are NPOV. They are, in fact, distinctly
> POV. Treating these topics in an NPOV manner requires us to clearly
> state that "there was never such a thing as an Armenian genocide" is a
> fringe theory which has a significant number of adherents only in
> Turkey.
>
> [[Creationism]] is clearly labeled as pseudoscience in the English
> Wikipedia right now. I have no problem with Wikiversity instructional
> materials that treat it as such. The scope of the project should be
> "educational materials with a scientific grounding"; there may be a
> need for additional ethical principles, but this is not it.
>
> Research is another story. Some research may only be a cover for
> propaganda. But the principle of open collaboration might be enough to
> discourage crackpots, who will find their nonsense ideas dismantled
> before they have even started putting them together. We've mostly been
> able to deal with propaganda on Wikinews so far, which encourages
> original reporting, comparable to original research.
>
> Erik
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