[Foundation-l] Wikiversity

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 12:41 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 March 2010 17:16, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 18 March 2010 16:33, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> 2010/3/18 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>>> > For what it's worth, I think it's probably a good idea to shut down
>>> > Wikiversity.  Wikiversity hasn't to my knowledge achieved anything of
>>> note.
>>>
>>> To be fair, I don't think that's equally true for all language
>>> editions. The German Wikiversity, from what I can see, seems to be
>>> slowly but productively doing what the project was designed to do:
>>> producing learning materials.
>>
>>
>>
>> Wikiversity was set up to do *two* things: produce learning materials, and
>> support learning/research activities and communities. The second question
>> was always more vaguely defined, but was always the more interesting
>> question for me. English Wikiversity's problems stem from an uncertainty
>> about what a legitimate learning/research activity would be, and a
>> consequent uncertainty in Wikiversity's scope as a project. Dealing with the
>> question of what someone is free to learn in Wikiversity is the useful
>> course of action to take here; rather than talk of closing the project.
>> Unfortunately, due to imminent submission of my thesis, I have no time to
>> give this for the next two weeks, but will get back to the discussion
>> thereafter.
>>
>> Cormac
>
>
> Well we could put in place a mechanism for creating open access
> journals then tell those in the open source community involved in the
> dwm mess to use it. Heh or start the journal of [citation needed] aka
> stuff wikipedians know but haven't been able to find a source for.
>
> --
> geni

Heh... "The Journal of Citation Needed" sounds more like a potential
blog than a journal, but I like it nonetheless :) Reference librarians
tend to use email lists for this sort of thing -- there are several
specialized and general lists for posting and answering hard
questions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stumpers-L is the most
famous). Maybe we need something similar :)

Re: Wikiversity -- it's worth nothing that PrivateMusings was told to
please quit it as early as mid-January by at least a couple of people
[see his enwp talk page], so the deletion of the Wikiversity page
didn't totally come out of the blue. Also PM posted a clarification to
the Signpost story that I wrote on my en.wp talk page, in which he
writes that no experiment was planned but only a few were written up
"in a very small way".

I suspect few of us have access to the deleted page to see for
ourselves, though personally it's hard for me to imagine someone --
anyone -- coming from the English Wikipedia and choosing such a topic
to write about in the first place without at least having the intent
to be provocative. How much intent does it take to become a troll?
More broadly, I think the global principle of "don't take your fight
to other projects" (x-project or x-language) is a good one, and we
should adopt and enforce it, but I don't know if that includes global
blocking.

-- phoebe