Re: Wikiversity and Wikibooks: can we answer the perennial question?

Hi,

I am a representative of the Wikibooks and Wikimedia-NL community. In fact I
have seen the presentations from Cormac and met him on the Dutch conference.
I guess this discussion is a follow-up on that.

My view is the following, stated also on the conference and not changed as a
result from those discussions.

The Dutch Wikibooks is a rather small project compared to the EN:WB and for
instance DE:WB (and WV's as well). There is nothing shortsighted about not
wanting to split op communities. If we would split up the Dutch Wikibooks in
WB and WV (that is what would happen) both projects would be at serious risk
for starting vegetating, because of lack of attention. Besides WV-NL would
have to be set-up again with own policies and even for filling the
wikiversity and help namespaces at WV, which is a shame as there will be a
huge overlap anyhow (resources wasted).

The reason not to want to start WV in Dutch is therefore purely practical.

Besides that I have an own view on MediaWiki as vehicle for E-learning: it
is not really fitting that purpose. Using Moodle for that would be much
better. I know the consensus is to use MediaWiki (that is sort of "own"
software) for Wikimedia-projects, but in fact I see no reason why we could
not use a better and different software.

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.

Then there is another factor which I consider and that is that Wikiversity
is, in my opinion, not yet finished: do we really have consensus on what
this project can do? 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.
I always thought that Wikiversity would be more interactive, following
courses with the help of an instructor, it doesn't seem to be like that
though.

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.

kind regards
Peter van Londen/Londenp

2007/11/14, Cormac Lawler <[email protected]>:
>
> Thanks for a great start on this discussion Andrew. :-) Just a very
> brief comment for now...
>
> On 11/13/07, Andrew Whitworth <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> <beginquote> The idea about expanding Wikibooks to encompass what
> Wikiversity would have become is an interesting one, although
> "wikiversity" sounds to me like more of a generalized learning
> resource then "wikibooks" does. That is, I think it is more intuitive
> that Wikiversity could be expanded to include textbooks then I do that
> Wikibooks could be expanded to include all sorts of "learning
> resources". <endquote>
>
>
> It's interesting that there was an initial idea to have a
> "WikiUniversity" project, for which the textbook project would be its
> library. (See [1] and [2].) Then the textbook project took over and
> Wikiversity became a component, albeit an uneasy one. :-)
>
> Cormac
>
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity/Archive_2#Visions
> [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity/Old
>
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