[Textbook-l] Wikiversity and Wikibooks: can we answer the perennial question?

[Andrew Whitworth]

> The Dutch Wikibooks is a rather small project compared to the EN:WB and for
> instance DE:WB (and WV's as well)...
> The reason not to want to start WV in Dutch is therefore purely practical.

There is some difference between not wanting to do it "now", and not wanting to do it "ever". If you take steps to make wikibooks more inclusive, and thus prevent wikiversity from ever separating from it, that is what I consider to be short sighted. However, if you keep Wikibooks "pure" in the sense that you only include books and not all sorts of other wikiversity-like materials, and allow wikibooks to grow into a strong pillar, then a separate wikiversity project makes an excellent compliment to that.

> As presented by Cormac using Wikibooks as a repository for learning
> resources which can be used in Wikiversity is a view I agree with. But that
> is not a reason to not host Wikibooks within Wikiversity or the other way
> round.

Exactly right. the two projects are symbiotic, and can really help to build each other up. I don't feel that they should be merged, because they do have different goals.

> For instance if I look at the featured project on
> Wikiversity which is: Filmmaking, I really don't see why this is not an
> instruction book and could be hosted on Wikibooks as well.

That does sort of bring up a good point, that many people tend to gravitate towards the rigid book structure of wikibooks, even in wikiversity. Because of the "features" of mediawiki, I think that many materials do tend to evolve into book-like shapes over time. This even happens at Wikipedia, where collections of related articles tend to rely on each other heavily. Such collections of articles have been used in the past as a starting point to new books (with varying degrees of success). 

I think that MediaWiki encourages the organization of content into books, and so it doesnt surprise me that some of the better WV courses appear very book-like. If anything, this is really a software limitation that works against Wikiversity, and I think the most important aspect of this all is whether or not WV can overcome that limitation. Because if time shows that Wikiversity is adept at making books, albeit in a slightly different manner, there might be a strong case to be made for a merger between the two projects.

> So in short: I would welcome to start with Wikiversity within the Wikibooks
> project, having a separate entree (a redirect from nl.wikiversity.org) but
> not splitting up the community. At least not until we are bigger and until
> the idea behind Wikiversity stands.

So long as you keep an open mind about it, that's perfectly fine. Like I said, time will tell all things. 

--Andrew Whitworth

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