Re: [Wikiversity-l] wiki research hub

Hi Juan: I hope it won't offend anyone too much if I say that the research currently hosted on Wikiversity is not all of high quality. (Note to reader: if you were offended by what I just said, please stop reading now, it's not my intention to offend anyone, I'm just sharing my impressions of the site as I think about whether it is suitable for use as the kind of Research Hub I've been imagining, or as a place to build a scholarly journal, etc.) Indeed, it's a bit hard to figure out what all is really meant to be included under the "research" label on Wikiversity. For instance, http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal:Research links to the "research-related portal" http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal:Mathematics -- but this page says: "Wikiversity participants who are interested in mathematics are invited to create and develop *learning projects* and *learning resources* and help organize them by developing this portal." If we return to the Research Portal itself, then there's this: "Guide to Research: The following is a dynamic listing of all the pages categorised into this portal. To restructure or extend this list, you will need to edit the category system itself. Where are the use instructions for this template?" (It seems like the curator(s) are having a public conversation with themselves here.) But, OK, examining the list of pages that are designated as belonging to research, my eyes are instantly drawn to things like: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Abd/Wikipedia,_Wikiversity_and_disrupti… http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brainless_humans_for_transplants(User:Super_… http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Dominant_group none of which are particularly easy for me to make sense of. This one is much more straightforward: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Early_telescope but it looks more like a student research project, rather than something that is aiming for eventual publication in a journal, or any other sort of further development. And this would describe many of the other articles that I sampled. It's not clear what the difference is between this kind of page and a Wikipedia page on the same topic. My initial conclusion is that Wikiversity's Research Portal could potentially be used as a research hub like I was envisioning, but it would need to be retooled almost completely, and most of the current content would get pushed into a "student research" or "science fiction" category. I'm not sure I have time to take on something like this! I'll be focusing on developing my own work elsewhere... and I'll report back to the other people looking at building a Research Hub to see what they think. Joe On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Juan de Vojníkov <juandevojnikov(a)gmail.com> wrote: