On 6/20/06, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
Absolutely not - Wikiversity will not seek to undermine or dilute the effort or material on Wikibooks. Instead, I would see the material as potentially overlapping with eachother, but formatted differently - in textbook form on Wikibooks, and broken down into learning activities on Wikibooks, which could be used by teachers as stand-alone lessons. Some material will be duplicated, but the mission of Wikiversity is not to duplicate this material unnecessarily - indeed, to promote the development of further material on other projects if that is a more appropriate place for it.
I think it makes sense to imagine, for a moment, that Wikibooks didn't exist, and that we started out with Wikiversity. It would be a place where people collaborate on all kinds of educational resources and the structure around them. As very different work methodologies emerge, it makes sense to split away groups into their own projects, as was done with Wikipedia=>Wiktionary, etc.
In the case of Wikiversity, we just have the process backwards. Wikibooks is a subset of the larger goal "educational resources". But it's only one of them. There may be other projects that split away from Wikiversity (while remaining associated with it). I could imagine the Research part being situated in its own wiki, the eLearning part, etc.
While having a community in a single wiki can lead to interesting synergies, in the end, if we have single login and some other cross-wiki tools (which we need anyway), whether something is an independent wiki or a single big place shouldn't make that much of a difference. Indeed, it shouldn't even make much of a difference if it is a Wikimedia wiki or not, as long as it is free content. Incidentally, there is an existing effort to create eLearning materials using a wiki at: http://wikieducator.org/
Depending on how it turns out, it make make sense to integrate it one way or another. The same is true for the Austrian Wikiversity. The important thing is that we form a network of free content platforms for collaboration among educators.
The tricky question for me is what to do with how-tos. I think they do have a place in Wikimedia, and a separate project for them might be a good idea. This could include gaming walkthroughs -- instructional materials of any kind. But my biggest hope is for documents from the open source community to be migrated into the wiki context. There are thousands of FAQs, HOWTOs and man pages which are still maintained by single individuals. I made a small effort to change this with OpenFacts, but this was in 2002, when many of the relevant people were still convinced that the future was in using a strict workflow approach within a CMS.
Erik