[Foundation-l] Idea for New Wikimedia Project, possible adjunct to wikiversity

[Andrew Whitworth]

>The project is called Wikinotes. In short, the wiki is split into a 
>category
>for every academic course (or every classroom) at every educational
>institution on the planet.

The amount of boiler-plate code you would need to institute this would be 
phenominal. Course names and numbers might be similar between different 
institutions. For instance, Math 21 at one university could be completely 
different from Math 21 at a different university. You would need to force 
contributors to create pages with some kind of hierarchical structure: "My 
Universty/My Class", or more specifically "My University/My Department/My 
Class/My Section". Keep in mind that even in a single university, a single 
course can have very different requirements and learning goals between 
individual sections.

>In each category, i.e. for each study course, students of that class can
>write/upload/type up notes for lessons taken in that class. This helps them
>share what they've learnt, fill in each other's gaps and ultimately builds
>an organised set of personal revision material for use when the class is
>complete (and exams loom).

It does help people share what they've learned, but verbatim "sharing" can 
also be construed as "plagiarism". A much more helpful resource would be one 
where people don't simply share notes verbatim, but are also forced to 
paraphrase them, rewrite them, reformat them, etc. Instead of creating a 
place to store online notes, we could create a list of existing wikimedia 
projects and resources that are working on subjects similar to those used in 
the particular class. For instance, If we say "Harvard University/Math 21 
(Calculus)", that page would create links to the various wikipedia, 
wikibooks, and wikiversity courses that mirror the material, without having 
to recreate it. Of course, simply having a list of links is generally 
against wikimedia policy anyway.

--Andrew Whitworth