Mailing List Archive

Wikiversity=>Wikisophia
(Cross-posted on [[m:Talk:Wikiversity]] and briefly summarized on
de.wikiversity.org)

During and after our visit to the free software conference in South
Africa, Angela and I talked a lot about the Wikiversity project, and the
potential Wikimedia has to develop a truly global, free institution of
learning as a new project.

As you probably know, these discussions are currently focused on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity
and the talk page.

Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not
going to push this until we have the server situation under control and
the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's one
issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the project.

Angela, Jimbo, Daniel Mayer and I agree that the name Wikiversity is
problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of
traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to
its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties,
degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being
perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.

I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as
well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established people
of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic university,
this doesn't belong here."

Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently owned
by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the Greek
sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the area of
learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not
limit the project very early in its nature or scope.

Peter is willing to give us the name if we push WikiTeX a little to get
it security-reviewed and installed on our servers, which seems like a
fair deal to us.

So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my
intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to
reflect the name change. This does not affect the existing efforts under
the Wikibooks domain which use the "Wikiversity" label, but only any
potential future eLearning/eTeaching project we intend to pursue.
de.wikiversity.org could be renamed and moved to the new domain once it
is owned by Wikimedia.

Thoughts and comments are welcome. Hopefully, we can find a consensus on
this without needing a vote.

All best,

Erik
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 23:10 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently owned
> by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the Greek
> sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the area of
> learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not
> limit the project very early in its nature or scope.
>
> Peter is willing to give us the name if we push WikiTeX a little to get
> it security-reviewed and installed on our servers, which seems like a
> fair deal to us.

I don't see how it's acceptable for us to agree to any conditions that
affect our prerogatives for software use. We need to use whatever
software best suits our purposes. WikiTeX is nice work, and we may
very well end up using it or something similar. But that has to be our
choice, and ours alone, based on our needs. We can certainly agree to
give him money and/or some official imprimatur, but not our freedom.

Secondly, what's wrong with good old fashioned plain-English multiple
word names for things like "Wikimedia Schools Project" or "Wikimedia
Offline" or something? The trend of squeezing things into obscure
neologisms strikes me as too cute for a serious project.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Lee Daniel Crocker-
> I don't see how it's acceptable for us to agree to any conditions that
> affect our prerogatives for software use. We need to use whatever
> software best suits our purposes. WikiTeX is nice work, and we may
> very well end up using it or something similar.

Of course we're not going to install WikiTeX if we decide that there's a
better option, but that seems unlikely. WikiTeX is one of the most
requested features from our users. What has been holding up its setup
are not criticisms of its functionality, but security considerations. As
I see it, if we do this, the Board will ask Brion, as a paid Wikimedia
employee, to assist Peter in the security review and evaluation of
WikiTeX and if, and only if, it meets our needs and our strict security
requirements, it's going to be installed. Peter is working on a
chroot-jail based approach already, which should help to address the
concerns about possible shell escapes in certain LaTeX macros.

I would never want to make compromises about security or freedom of
choice. This is more a matter of exchanging favors within the limits of
sanity.

> Secondly, what's wrong with good old fashioned plain-English multiple
> word names for things like "Wikimedia Schools Project" or "Wikimedia
> Offline" or something?

Wikimedia is not an English language project, for starters. This makes
it necessary for English language derived names like Wiktionary to be
localized, which then leads to confusion when you go to a domain like
pl.wiktionary.org and end up on a site called Wikisłownik. Of course, to
a certain extent, you will never be able to avoid this, but at least in
the Latin languages, you can strive for a name which doesn't require
localization. Wiktionary is not too bad because it's still a neologism,
whereas something like "Wikimedia Dictionary" would be much worse.

Secondly, if you want a fully descriptive name, this would make the name
unwieldy and impractical. "Wikimedia Computer Assisted Learning,
Teaching, Certification and Index of Resources" would obviously be
unacceptable. You can try making a nice acronym out of it, but then you
end up with the English language problem mentioned above.

A short and unique name is also useful for searching the project and
marketing it. That is why companies, including those working in
academia, come up with short and catchy names for their products.
Anything unsexy or unwieldy will not be found or linked as frequently as
something short and memorable. You can trust capitalism when it comes to
the mechanisms of meme optimization.

Finally, consistency is important. We have an established naming scheme
-- our projects have unique names that usually begin with "Wiki-" -- and
in order to maintain our corporate identity, new projects should follow
the same pattern. (Incidentally, I named the "Wikimedia Commons" using a
different pattern because it is not a regular Wikimedia project, but an
umbrella project used by all others. Regardless, it is often abbreviated
as "Wikicommons", indicating a strong desire of users to have names
following this pattern..)

FWIW, the "cute" part of "Wikisophia" is not "-sophia", but "Wiki", and
we're pretty much stuck with that no matter what we do.

Erik
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 04:52 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Of course we're not going to install WikiTeX if we decide that there's a
> better option, but that seems unlikely. WikiTeX is one of the most
> requested features from our users.

Just because users demand something, that doesn't mean it's really
what they need. Part of the job of good software design is filtering
user input to determine what the user's problem really is, and finding
the best way to solve that problem regardless of what the user thinks
is the right solution.

I like WikiTeX, and the formal wiki syntax I'm working on has a nearly
identical extension-based syntax for the kinds of things it does.

It might be a good idea to, say, promise to devote some resources to do
a security review and make WikiTeX part of the mediawiki software on
SourceForge that other wikis install, but not commit to installing it
ourselves until we do more work on performance as well.

> Wikimedia is not an English language project, for starters. This makes
> it necessary for English language derived names like Wiktionary to be
> localized, which then leads to confusion when you go to a domain like
> pl.wiktionary.org and end up on a site called Wikisłownik. Of course, to
> a certain extent, you will never be able to avoid this, but at least in
> the Latin languages, you can strive for a name which doesn't require
> localization. Wiktionary is not too bad because it's still a neologism,
> whereas something like "Wikimedia Dictionary" would be much worse.

I don't see that at all--plain words translate into plain words
directly: "Dictionnaire Wikipédia", "Wikipedia Słownik", etc.
Trying to find a latin-based neologism or something doesn't avoid
the problem of translation, it just warps it a bit.

> A short and unique name is also useful for searching the project and
> marketing it...
> FWIW, the "cute" part of "Wikisophia" is not "-sophia", but "Wiki", and
> we're pretty much stuck with that no matter what we do.

Fair enough. "Wikisophia" is a fine name, and might not have to be
translated in some languages (though Bulgarians might think it's just
a local chapter or something :-). I just don't think a serious
academic project should fall into the habit of marketing-speak, even
if it would be effective (which is far from given).

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/10/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:
> Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not
> going to push this until we have the server situation under control and
> the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's one
> issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the project.

I'm panicking. Based on what you've announced below, it sounds like
this hijacking of a project that I and others have been keen on for a
long time has been already decided.

> Angela, Jimbo, Daniel Mayer and I agree that the name Wikiversity is
> problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of
> traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to
> its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties,
> degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being
> perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.

I've explained a number of ways this could work in the past. There's
basic models in both English and German. It's an excellent way to
expand what Wikimedia does into a whole new area, and boost Wikibooks
in the process - while also utilising the existing resource in
Wikipedia.

> I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as
> well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established people
> of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic university,
> this doesn't belong here."

It depends what you're talking about. Myself and the others who've
been pursuing this have a fair idea of how a tertiary-level system
could work. If you've got a way to expand it to primary and secondary
education (without simply producing textbooks), I'm all ears.

> Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently owned
> by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the Greek
> sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the area of
> learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not
> limit the project very early in its nature or scope.

Excuse my terseness, but this is vile. Wikipedia, Wiktionary,
Wikisource and Wikibooks all make it reasonably clear from the title
what the project is actually about. Where Wikiversity would follow
this trend, "Wikisophia" is about as vague as you can get. It just
screams "place to dump random stuff".

> So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my
> intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to
> reflect the name change. This does not affect the existing efforts under
> the Wikibooks domain which use the "Wikiversity" label, but only any
> potential future eLearning/eTeaching project we intend to pursue.
> de.wikiversity.org could be renamed and moved to the new domain once it
> is owned by Wikimedia.

If you move the pages on meta, or change the summary, I'll move/revert
them back, until you actually consult the community and put this
through a vote. You've absolutely no business unilaterally pulling
this - or doing so without consulting anyone but the board. It also
seems pretty damned rich to suggest that it's not going to affect the
English version (which was never meant to be a part of Wikibooks -
it's still there as a beta of what a seperate project would look
like), while in the next sentence stating that you plan to hijack the
German version for your project.

I thought Wikispecies was a terrible idea, and so far, I think I've
been proved right. In terms of disaster ideas, though, this one well
and truly takes the cake.

-- ambi
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Erik Moeller wrote:

> During and after our visit to the free software conference in South
> Africa, Angela and I talked a lot about the Wikiversity project, and
> the potential Wikimedia has to develop a truly global, free
> institution of learning as a new project.
>
> As you probably know, these discussions are currently focused on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity
> and the talk page.
>
> Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not
> going to push this until we have the server situation under control
> and the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's
> one issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the
> project.

Good, I think that a lot of groundwork needs to be laid before we get there.

> Angela, Jimbo, Daniel Mayer and I agree that the name Wikiversity is
> problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of
> traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to
> its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties,
> degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being
> perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.

I still prefer the term wikiversity. I don't feel the strong
association with traditional universities, nor any of the other
perceptions that you have of it. There was a time when university was
another name for a corporation. What I find attractive about
"wikiversity" of turning toward a totality in a more classical approach
to learning.

> I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as
> well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established
> people of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic
> university, this doesn't belong here."

Absolutely. I believe that education is a seemless lifelong process.
Separate buildings for different levels of education makes sense in the
brick and mortar world. Just as much as Wikipedia is not paper,
Wikiversity is not bricks and mortar. Certainly there will be people to
raise the kind of objection that you mention, but I don't expect them to
be very influential.

> Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently
> owned by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the
> Greek sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the
> area of
> learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not
> limit the project very early in its nature or scope.

I find "sophia" to be a little pompous, and I also link it with the
concept of sophistry. Teaching wisdom is a bit akin to teaching common
sense. There is also the possibility of confusion with "Sophia
University", the Jesuit university in Japan.

> So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my
> intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to
> reflect the name change.

This action seems premature.

Ec
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I find "sophia" to be a little pompous, and I also link it with the
> concept of sophistry. Teaching wisdom is a bit akin to teaching
> common sense.

I mostly agree with this as well; I find "Wikisophia" a kind of
weird-looking name, and a bit pretentious. I might be in the minority
(?), but I never interpreted "Wikiversity" as actually a university, but
in a more metaphorical sense---sort of like [[en:Wikipedia:Sandbox]]. I
wouldn't be averse to some other name I suppose, but I can't think of
one offhand that I like better.

-Mark
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/10/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > During and after our visit to the free software conference in South
> > Africa, Angela and I talked a lot about the Wikiversity project, and
> > the potential Wikimedia has to develop a truly global, free
> > institution of learning as a new project.
> >
> > As you probably know, these discussions are currently focused on
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity
> > and the talk page.
> >
> > Don't panic: We're still a long way from launching anything. I'm not
> > going to push this until we have the server situation under control
> > and the existing projects have stabilized a bit. Nevertheless, there's
> > one issue that I'd like to resolve now, which is the naming of the
> > project.
>
> Good, I think that a lot of groundwork needs to be laid before we get there.
>
> > Angela, Jimbo, Daniel Mayer and I agree that the name Wikiversity is
> > problematic in that it ties the project very strongly to the idea of
> > traditional universities. This may lead to certain expectations as to
> > its structure and the services it will provide (e.g. faculties,
> > degrees), but also limit the project in other ways, e.g., by being
> > perceived primarily or only as an institution of teritary learning.
>
> I still prefer the term wikiversity. I don't feel the strong
> association with traditional universities, nor any of the other
> perceptions that you have of it. There was a time when university was
> another name for a corporation. What I find attractive about
> "wikiversity" of turning toward a totality in a more classical approach
> to learning.
>
> > I'd like us to look at ideas for primary and secondary education as
> > well, and I don't want to run into a wall because the established
> > people of the Wikiversity community will say "It's an electronic
> > university, this doesn't belong here."
>
> Absolutely. I believe that education is a seemless lifelong process.
> Separate buildings for different levels of education makes sense in the
> brick and mortar world. Just as much as Wikipedia is not paper,
> Wikiversity is not bricks and mortar. Certainly there will be people to
> raise the kind of objection that you mention, but I don't expect them to
> be very influential.
>
> > Angela suggested the name Wikisophia.org/.com, which is currently
> > owned by Peter Danenberg (WikiTeX). I loved the idea immediately: the
> > Greek sophia means "wisdom", but also has many other meanings in the
> > area of
> > learning. It is specific enough to be useful and vague enough to not
> > limit the project very early in its nature or scope.
>
> I find "sophia" to be a little pompous, and I also link it with the
> concept of sophistry. Teaching wisdom is a bit akin to teaching common
> sense. There is also the possibility of confusion with "Sophia
> University", the Jesuit university in Japan.
>
> > So, after discussing this in a small circle, I'd like to announce my
> > intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and edit the summary to
> > reflect the name change.
>
> This action seems premature.
>
> Ec
>

How about Wikilearning? Or Wikiducation? Another idea could be to have
a parallel project to Wikiversity and call it Wikischools.

I'd like to get involved - have long had it in mind - and will try to
give some practical input when I'm not so busy with my own studies. I
have some experience and knowledge that might be useful.

Cormac
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Hi :-)

I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more to me, and
wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on this name change.

Ant
Re: Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
--- Anthere <anthere9@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more to me, and
> wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on this name change.

OK - given that along with the other objections, I now withdraw my weak support
for the name change. All we need to do is say, up front, that we will not limit
Wikiversity to college level and above courses; that all levels of learning
will be allowed.

We should also invest in getting those security concerns for WikiTeX addressed.
Not to get a domain name, but because it makes sense to do so in light of the
very strong desire in users to have this functionality.

-- mav





__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
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Re: Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/10/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149@yahoo.com> wrote:
> OK - given that along with the other objections, I now withdraw my weak support
> for the name change. All we need to do is say, up front, that we will not limit
> Wikiversity to college level and above courses; that all levels of learning
> will be allowed.

Then "wikilearn" makes sense.

But then again it's a shame to have yet another english (or
european-derived, for that matter) term. What is sanskrit for
"learn", I wonder?

--
John Fader
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Rebecca:

Your accusations are uncalled for. I will responed to the substantial
points of your letter.

> a project that I and others have been keen on for a
> long time has been already decided.

Nothing has been decided. It is not clear at all that Wikiversity (or
Wikisophia) will be launched, or what it will encompass. The procedure
for new projects requires board approval and a vote, none of which has
taken place.

> It depends what you're talking about. Myself and the others who've
> been pursuing this have a fair idea of how a tertiary-level system
> could work. If you've got a way to expand it to primary and secondary
> education (without simply producing textbooks), I'm all ears.

This is what I'm currently exploring through an evaluation of existing
Learning Management Systems. The key question to me is what changes need
to be made to our software to support all types of learning and assessment.

> Wikipedia, Wiktionary,
> Wikisource and Wikibooks all make it reasonably clear from the title
> what the project is actually about. Where Wikiversity would follow
> this trend, "Wikisophia" is about as vague as you can get. It just
> screams "place to dump random stuff".

That's because, as I said, it is not at all clear what the scope of
Wikisophia will be, whether it will, for example, include original
research and publication, certification, summarization of certifications
into degrees, and so on. A name that is reasonable open-ended allows us
to explore the possibilities relatively freely.

> consult the community and put this through a vote.

I will proceed to do so.

Erik
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Erik Moeller wrote:

>
>
> Finally, consistency is important. We have an established naming
> scheme -- our projects have unique names that usually begin with
> "Wiki-" -- and in order to maintain our corporate identity, new
> projects should follow the same pattern. (Incidentally, I named the
> "Wikimedia Commons" using a different pattern because it is not a
> regular Wikimedia project, but an umbrella project used by all others.
> Regardless, it is often abbreviated as "Wikicommons", indicating a
> strong desire of users to have names following this pattern..)
>
> FWIW, the "cute" part of "Wikisophia" is not "-sophia", but "Wiki",
> and we're pretty much stuck with that no matter what we do.
>
> Erik
>
Wikiversity is great, but quite rightly suggests tertiary education. How
about Wikademy ("academy"), and Wikitutor for the intermediate and
junior versions of the educational resource, respectively?

-- Neil
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/10/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:
> Rebecca:
>
> Your accusations are uncalled for. I will responed to the substantial
> points of your letter.
>
> > a project that I and others have been keen on for a
> > long time has been already decided.
>
> Nothing has been decided. It is not clear at all that Wikiversity (or
> Wikisophia) will be launched, or what it will encompass. The procedure
> for new projects requires board approval and a vote, none of which has
> taken place.
>
> > It depends what you're talking about. Myself and the others who've
> > been pursuing this have a fair idea of how a tertiary-level system
> > could work. If you've got a way to expand it to primary and secondary
> > education (without simply producing textbooks), I'm all ears.
>
> This is what I'm currently exploring through an evaluation of existing
> Learning Management Systems. The key question to me is what changes need
> to be made to our software to support all types of learning and assessment.

There is something I am not entirely understanding there. I have, for
one, no real clue as to what Wikiversity is all about, but Erik, are
you actually working/have worked on the launch/development of this
project before you discovered it existed not so long ago? (see a
previous thread on this list where you seemed to uncover the whole
concept all of sudden).

Why suddenly go through all these proposals and changes without
consulting the people who actually have been developping the project
in their own corner and own time, to find together a solution and
actually address the right community before launching any grand
community vote?

It is one thing to "launch" a project, it is altogether another to
make it live and make it sustainable, it seems to me that what Rebecca
has said is that having been a part of this project for a long time,
she does not exactly understand where and how suddenly we are talking
about changing the name and such. An understandable surprise.

It could also be that I have not understood a thing about what this
thread is all about.

This said, I very much agree with Rebecca that Wikisophia is way too
broad and does not actually bring anything. It akes me think of
something having to do with philosophy. I like the Wikademy idea. At
least it works in French. ;-)

Cheers,

--
Delphine
~notafish
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
Delphine-

> There is something I am not entirely understanding there. I have, for
> one, no real clue as to what Wikiversity is all about

That is the main problem with the project, and has been from the start.
The current English Wikiversity subproject is organized in a
pseudo-namespace on Wikibooks:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity

There are various "School" pages, most of which are stubs, some of which
are vague collections of links to Wikibooks and Wikipedia, and very few
of which make real attempts to organize information in courses. Due to
the nature of (pseudo-)namespaces, information is strewn about: some is
in the article namespace, some is in the proper pseudo-namespace, and it
is very difficult to search the content properly. Categories are missing
almost entirely. The software needs of the project have never been
properly evaluated -- all that is used are standard blank wiki pages.

With such a broad scope, people have no idea what to put on those blank
pages, so everyone is putting something different there. And, as
expected, the project follows very strongly the models of traditional
universities, which is not necessarily what is appropriate to achieve
the desired goals.

Given this, it is quite bitterly ironic that Ambi refers to the possible
outcome of (re-)organizing the project as "disastrous"; it can hardly
get any worse than it is at the present time. Moving this mess of pages
to its own domain name is a recipe for failure.

To be sure, there is quite a bit of text that we can use, but the
current (English) Wikibooks-Wikiversity effort lacks the sort of
coherence and structure required to make meaningful progress. As I
noted, until the point I refactored the page, [[m:Wikiversity]] itself
was a very long, very chaotic discussion about the definition of the
project without any real conclusion. The English Wikiversity page
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Some_ideas_about_Wikiversity is a bit more
useful, but a long way from setting out any clear structure for
organizing the project.

Many people are very excited about the idea, but very few people agree
on what it actually means. The process of moving the project from a
subspace on Wikibooks to its own domain name, as an official Wikimedia
project, is the best possible opportunity to rethink Wikiversity, to
evaluate and prioritize its technical needs, to get the existing
eLearning community involved, to develop useful and consistent policies,
to define and pursue long term goals, and so on.

> Why suddenly go through all these proposals and changes without
> consulting the people who actually have been developping the project
> in their own corner and own time

There have been no "proposals and changes without consulting". I have
suggested changing the name of the project, and I have cross-posted this
suggestion to the relevant multi-language fora. This *is* a solicitation
of feedback from the existing Wikiversity community on the proposed name
change.

> to find together a solution and
> actually address the right community before launching any grand
> community vote?

Ambi was the one who called for a vote on the name. Nobody is talking
about a general community vote on the project yet.

Erik
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/9/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:
> Lee Daniel Crocker-
> > I don't see how it's acceptable for us to agree to any conditions that
> > affect our prerogatives for software use. We need to use whatever
> > software best suits our purposes. WikiTeX is nice work, and we may
> > very well end up using it or something similar.
>
> Of course we're not going to install WikiTeX if we decide that there's a
> better option, but that seems unlikely. WikiTeX is one of the most
> requested features from our users. What has been holding up its setup
> are not criticisms of its functionality, but security considerations. As
> I see it, if we do this, the Board will ask Brion, as a paid Wikimedia
> employee, to assist Peter in the security review and evaluation of

Where do users log such feature requests? I see four people have
voted for the relevant bug, which was filed six weeks ago:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1792

I don't think the "paid Wikimedia employee" has much to do with this process.
Of course the person best positioned to judge security considerations may
indeed by SPARTA^B^B^B^Brion ...

> This makes it necessary for English language derived names like Wiktionary to
> be localized, which then leads to confusion when you go to a domain like
> pl.wiktionary.org and end up on a site called Wikis³ownik.

This is confusing? Hopefully not, if you know any Polish! The Red
Cross and similar orgs seem to do just fine with translations into
many languages. So does Wikipedia, in fact.

SJ
Re: Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
I agree with Anthere :)

Cordialement,

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant
CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2
http://soufron.free.fr

Le 10 mai 05, à 12:45, Anthere a écrit :

> Hi :-)
>
> I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more to me, and
> wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on this name change.
>
> Ant
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Re: Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On Tuesday, May 10, 2005, at 11:12, Jean-Baptiste Soufron
<jbsoufron@gmail.com> wrote:

> Le 10 mai 05, à 12:45, Anthere a écrit :
>
> > I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more
> > to me, and wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on
> > this name change.
>
> I agree with Anthere :)

Hmm. I rather liked someone's (whose?) suggestion of "Wikademy", which is
has the same contraction of the "Wiki" prefix to "Wik" that we have in
"Wiktionary", for example, but is strongly educationally-themed without
having too much of a Higher Education feel to it; indeed, it much more
stresses a Further Education bent which I think is the direction that the
project is heading towards... ?

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james@jdforrester.org | jon@eh.org | csvla@dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM : (MSN) jamesdforrester@hotmail.com
Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia [ In reply to ]
On 5/11/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:

> There are various "School" pages, most of which are stubs, some of which
> are vague collections of links to Wikibooks and Wikipedia, and very few
> of which make real attempts to organize information in courses. Due to
> the nature of (pseudo-)namespaces, information is strewn about: some is
> in the article namespace, some is in the proper pseudo-namespace, and it
> is very difficult to search the content properly. Categories are missing
> almost entirely. The software needs of the project have never been
> properly evaluated -- all that is used are standard blank wiki pages.

This is all it's ever going to become as long as it sits in template
mode in Wikibooks. Give it wings and it will fly.

> With such a broad scope, people have no idea what to put on those blank
> pages, so everyone is putting something different there. And, as
> expected, the project follows very strongly the models of traditional
> universities, which is not necessarily what is appropriate to achieve
> the desired goals.

A broad scope? The site Erik is advocating has no defined purpose
apart from "learning", and no model of how this could be achieved. Our
current model sets out a potential site design. Furthermore, I've
argued in the past of how this could work - taking some of the basic
ideas behind the structure of a university, and adapting them to
create our own e-learning project following wiki principles. There is
the potential for courses in all sorts of areas - not just your
standard tertiary fare - and the potential to boost Wikibooks, because
it would create the need to design workable textbooks and
supplementary materials.

> Given this, it is quite bitterly ironic that Ambi refers to the possible
> outcome of (re-)organizing the project as "disastrous"; it can hardly
> get any worse than it is at the present time. Moving this mess of pages
> to its own domain name is a recipe for failure.

It does need to be more clearly defined before being taken live - that
is true. I've had it in mind to write up a Wikinews-style proposal
since you began the process with that project, but haven't had the
time nor motivation to do so as of yet. This is why I'm *not* arguing
to move the current model to its own domain name at this very moment -
although I believe it would be a very good idea to do so in the
future.

> Many people are very excited about the idea, but very few people agree
> on what it actually means. The process of moving the project from a
> subspace on Wikibooks to its own domain name, as an official Wikimedia
> project, is the best possible opportunity to rethink Wikiversity, to
> evaluate and prioritize its technical needs, to get the existing
> eLearning community involved, to develop useful and consistent policies,
> to define and pursue long term goals, and so on.

Precisely. The way to do this, however, is not to throw the entire
idea out the window and insist on some amorphous mass that would not
even try to be a coherent project, but to finetune what's already been
proposed by the interested parties.


> There have been no "proposals and changes without consulting". I have
> suggested changing the name of the project, and I have cross-posted this
> suggestion to the relevant multi-language fora. This *is* a solicitation
> of feedback from the existing Wikiversity community on the proposed name
> change.

That's not what you advocated in your first post, but whatever - at
least it's a step away from mutilating the proposal immediately.

-- ambi