This interview is a collaboration by contributors of Wikiversity. Since it is a collaboration by many, no individual interviewee(s) will be named.
Wikiversity is the Wikimedia Foundation's youngest project, aimed both at creating educational materials and at providing a forum to learn interactively in a wiki environment. Originally begun in Wikibooks, it was split off officially in 2006, with the English Wikiversity, Beta, and three other language Wikiversities established in August 2006. Contrary to what people might think in relation to its name, Wikiversity is not limited to university (tertiary) level materials/activities, but incorporates in its scope materials and activities of all styles and levels – from pre-school to lifelong learning. There are seven individual language Wikiversity projects – English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish – as well as a multilingual hub for inter-project coordination.
Wikiversity is both a repository of educational content, and a space for learning. As a repository, it follows a model similar to other sister projects, particularly Wikipedia and Wikibooks – though it strives not to overlap unnecessarily with these projects – and there are good 'course'-type resources in areas such as filmmaking and technical writing. However, as a learning space, it is in a much more experimental phase – learning about how learning can be facilitated in a wiki (specifically Mediawiki) model, and how other technologies (such as IRC, voice chat, blogs, as well as a dedicated "sandbox server") can be utilized to augment the wiki model. There is a strong emphasis on "learning by doing" (or "experiential learning") in the Wikiversity learning model – and there are also initiatives to make Wikiversity a personal learning environment (see examples). Several reading groups have evolved, which indicate promising and viable means of "learning the wiki way".
Wikiversity's scope, mission, and inclusion guidelines differ radically from the other Wikimedia Foundation wikis, in that it encourages the use of the wiki for building learning communities, and voicing opinions – many users have blogs in their userspaces, and there is a certain amount of freedom to go beyond NPOV through disclosing bias. There is also freedom to undertake and report on certain types of original research, the horticultural Bloom Clock being the oldest and largest of the research projects. Due to its educational mission, Wikiversity also has a more tolerant approach towards content and activity, preferring to educate rather than deter participants (by deleting or banning).
The roots of Wikiversity go back to August 2003, when Wikibooks was being formed and the idea of a larger learning project was being brainstormed. As a result of these discussions, Wikibooks was set up as a textbook repository, and Wikiversity was set up as a sub-project within Wikibooks. When Wikiversity was proposed for deletion from Wikibooks, there followed a vigorous and lengthy discussion about where and how Wikiversity would exist, and what its future would hold. This prompted the development of a proposal – on Meta – to set up Wikiversity as a separate Wikimedia project. After much discussion, and one rejected proposal, Wikiversity was finally launched in its "beta phase" as an official project in August 2006. Wikiversity has never officially been declared to have emerged from its beta phase, and the probability is that it will continue in its experimental phase for some time, perhaps some years.
Measuring Wikiversity's progress can be difficult due to its wide scope, but it has managed to build a very strong community, and content has been slowly but steadily created and improved over the first eighteen months (somewhere in between what one would expect of a glacier and a rolling snowball). Currently several users are working on outreach efforts aimed at brick-and-mortar institutions and organizations to see where and how we can be of assistance in helping to create educational materials and learning communities.
For further reading, see History of Wikiversity, a summary written by editor JWSchmidt, and the future of Wikiversity
There are many visions for Wikiversity – a repository of open educational resources (see also currently running learning project composing free and open online educational resources), an experiment in wiki-based learning, a global learning community, a radical alternative to fee-based education – but to name a few. Wikiversity is adaptable and broad enough to incorporate many of these visions – and certainly the first three of these are inherent aspects of Wikiversity's scope and mission. Whether Wikiversity will become or provide an alternative to brick-and-mortar institutions is substantially more controversial – having been explicitly rejected by the board in their first evaluation of the Wikiversity proposal. However, there certainly remains room for imagining and defining what role Wikiversity could play in a the world of "open education" – which might involve collaborations between open content/activity sites (like Wikiversity) and accredited institutions (like traditional universities).
| Wikiversity Mission Statement
Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:
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The singular focus of Wikibooks is to create free and up-to-date textbooks for the use of both institutional and non-institutional students and teachers. The Wikiversities differ from this in several ways, perhaps the most important being that we often focus more on participation as the end product, rather than always moving towards a goal of producing content.
Wikiversity supports online learning communities, groups of people who are trying to learn about particular topics. Wikiversity is a place where these learning groups can assemble and discover how best to learn things online. Wikiversity is also the first WikiMedia project that is open to hosting and fostering research.
Wikiversity's fundamental unit is neither a book (Wikibooks) nor an encyclopedia article (Wikipedia); it is a learning resource (see Learning Resources). A learning resource is a text or genre which can outwardly resemble a book or an article, but differs in a number of respects. While we haven't settled on a complete definition of learning resources, we can say that possible identifying characteristics may include any number of: segmentation to facilitate learning, sequencing by difficulty level, didactic use of repetition and redundancy, discernible paths from known to unknown, the involvement of an audience of learners, association with a real-world educational context, the setting of explicit learning goals, conformity with a real-world curriculum of learning, a style which reflects an immediacy of a learning situation or other stylistic criteria typical of didactic intent. In short, it's about learning rather than exposition. While it is true that a "participatory" concept has entered some of the Wikiversity planning processes, it is a subset of actual editing efforts which reflect heterogeneous educational visions and methodologies.
For more comparisons and questions, you can look at Wikiversity FAQ.
Some examples are:
It depends who you are and what you want to do! If you want to find content that could be useful to you in teaching a class, or helping you learn, you can browse Wikiversity's portals and categories, or search for specific content. If you want to learn about something, you can browse Wikiversity's learning projects (or simply follow the method for searching for content – often pages titled like resources are in fact more like learning projects). If you can't find anything that will help you, you can set up a page or project that frames the subject of what you want to learn, and invite people to help you or collaborate with you to learn about something that specifically interests you.
Often the best way for new contributors to become involved is to simply introduce themselves on the Colloquium. Let the community know what they're interested in, and ask for advice on how to start.
If the new vision for Wikiversity is generally accepted, newcomers will find a slightly stronger encouragement to identify with (and perhaps combine) various roles – i.e. educator, learner, researcher, maintenance. In earlier Wikipedia days, newcomer activity was naturally more strongly orientated towards productive roles, whereas the typical Wikipedia user is now primarily a consumer. Wikiversity is still in its formative phase, which means that productive roles such as educator, researcher and maintenance receive more emphasis and this is where newcomers would mostly focus their activity. This continuing emphasis on productive roles as in the early days of Wikipedia is one of the things which makes Wikiversity especially attractive for experienced editors from other Wikimedia projects.
Administration on Wikiversity is handled quite differently than it is on other projects (for one thing, they're referred to as Custodians, not "admins"). The original cohort were very concerned by the political connotations of Administratorship on other Foundation wikis (especially Wikipedia), so we decided to use a different name, and we also adopted a very different method of allocating the tools by using a "mentorship" strategy. Rather than electing Custodians before they receive the tools, we instead allow established and experienced custodians to mentor new custodians for one month, and then seek community input after that "probationary period" is over. In most cases, this has been quite effective in removing the political elements of it, which is important to us because we want to encourage all trusted users to have the tools available if and when they might need them. As far as the actual tasks go, they're no different from any other wiki. We clean up vandalism, block vandals, delete junk, etc.
Custodians also take part in tasks as applying and creating with others policies such as NPOV in the educational context.
Currently there are six languages available (English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish) and the Japanese Wikiversity approved but not yet created. Other languages are incubated on beta wikiversity while they build their communities. They are separated after certain criteria which include e.g. having 10 or more active editors. Wikiversity as a whole is less than 2 years old, so there simply hasn't been as much time for other-language projects to develop.
Part of that comes from a lot of people having a lot of ideas early in the process. Originally, there was discussion of having a somewhat hierarchical structure of Schools, Departments, and Classes, but the Foundation objected to this structure, and in general we've found ourselves doing quite well without it. The "Topic" namespace was originally somewhat of a replacement for Departments, but has since developed to become more of an organizational tool. The Schools themselves have been largely inactive lately, as community members concentrate more on the main namespace. More info can be found at Wikiversity namespaces.
Outreach has been a focus since the beginning and is now also supported with the Wikiversity:Vision 2009. Contributors are attracted from our sister projects, but also from outside institutions and communities. However, our most successful recruiting has probably been passive: people come across us from one place or another and have an "aha!" experience when they recognize our scope and potential, and when they find the welcoming and supportive community which is the foundation of our efforts.
We also "recruit" people from Wikipedia pages/articles to related learning projects that we have on Wikiversity. The Ivan Illich page on Wikipedia, for example, has a template that draws people to the Wikiversity reading group for Illich's text.
Yes, Wikiversity is a place for developing and hosting research projects. Some of the successful projects are Bloom Clock and Wikimedia Demographics. Join also the discussion about forming an academic board to oversee and manage research projects – see Wikiversity research.
Adaptation of MediaWiki (technical) and liason with WMF (policy) in order to provide an optimal online environment for wiki-based learning. For example, being able to embed multimedia, show rss feeds, favourite pages, use web2.0 social networking, wysiwig editing, etc. to encourage learner participation, and to help foster learning communities and powerful wikiversity-based learning experiences. One way to progress here is with the Topic:Sandbox Server 0.5.
Yes, see Wikiversity:Main Page, there are:
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "They Might Be Giants", "John Flansburgh", and "John Linnell". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Candidates can submit their names for the 2008 Board Elections during the period 8 May to 22 May. As of press time, no candidates had submitted names.
Recent mentions in the online press include:
Two university projects in short succession have shown strikingly different outcomes with respect to the relationship between Wikipedia and educational institutions. As reported in the April 14 edition of the Signpost, the Murder, Madness, and Mayhem project produced three featured articles and eight good articles over the course of a college semester. These included the very first example of featured content created as part of an educational assignment—an article on the Guatemalan novel El Señor Presidente—which was displayed on the main page on 5 May.
By contrast, the past few days have seen a rather less successful attempt to integrate Wikipedia into the college curriculum: as discussed at length at the Administrators’ noticeboard, a professor teaching a class in Global Economics asked his students to upload their essays to the encyclopedia, but these have in the main been swiftly deleted, merged, or redirected. Of 70 newly created articles, about half were deleted, many were merged or redirected, only seven have survived in anything like their original form, and only one (Organ trade) is free of cleanup tags. The question is whether future projects can be more like Murder, Madness and Mayhem, and avoid the mistakes of the Global Economics foray.
These two extremes are not the first educational projects on Wikipedia. Over the past five years, more than 70 such initiatives have been registered at Wikipedia:School and university projects, from institutions as diverse as Yale University and the University of Tartu, Estonia, on topics ranging from immunology to Ancient Rome. It is likely that for each registered project, many more are conducted without formal registration. Two years ago, the Signpost reported that Wikipedia classroom assignments were on the rise; as more academics and teachers recognize the learning potential of basing assignments on their students' active engagement with Wikipedia, this trend is probably increasing significantly. Advice and support for teachers and students is available from WikiProject Classroom Coordination.
Not all of these undertakings have aimed at producing featured content; there are many possible productive ways in which Wikipedia can aid student learning. The structure and aims of Wikipedia-related learning experiences have varied significantly, and have included writing one article or many, and learning about "the chaos and joy of collaborative editing" (The University of Hong Kong) and "becom[ing] familiar with wikipedia as a community and as a knowledge resource" (The College of Idaho).
But what can schools and universities contribute to Wikipedia? One of the encyclopedia's goals is to provide articles of professional quality, and featured articles are defined as "exemplif[ying] our very best work". The novelty of Murder, Madness, and Mayhem was its explicit objective of increasing the number of featured articles. Could other schools and universities follow suit?
At the very least, there needs to be a way of avoiding the debacle of multiple deletions, which in the case of the "Global Economics" uploads even led to talk of blocking an entire range of university IP addresses. As such reactions indicate, when the relationship between universities and Wikipedia misfires, it is perceived as disruption on Wikipedia; for instructors and their students, the experience must be just as frustrating. Even with more successful initiatives, such as one from the University of Washington-Bothell that was featured on CNN, among other major media outlets, the relationship is not always happy: as one news source summarized it, "Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues".
Both sides must do better. Discussing recent events, User:Noble Story declared "Maybe no school project will ever be able to emulate WP:MMM, but we can at least encourage them to try".
As coordinator of Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, I think there were a number of keys to that project's success; most of these were simple and could easily be repeated. There is no reason why future projects cannot emulate our success, and contribute articles that exemplify Wikipedia's best work as well as providing students with a rich and productive learning experience. There is no reason why an educational assignment should not aim to produce featured content. Here are some basic principles that may increase the likelihood of success.
To expand this last point, a more controversial suggestion is that students should start immediately editing in main space (rather than first working on their articles in user-space, off-site, or some other mediawiki configuration). This will allow them to absorb Wikipedia conventions from day one, and to profit from the guidance (and perhaps the criticism) of other editors.
Creating a featured article is a difficult task; there are, however, ways of making a difficult task at least a little easier. For a class to have a reasonable shot, they should bear in mind the following points.
Murder, Madness, and Mayhem had the immense advantage in attracting the early attention of the FA-Team, a group of experienced editors dedicated to helping newer users to bring their articles to featured status; without them, we would never have achieved our challenging goal. However, it is no detraction from the FA-Team's efforts and dedication to wager that any organized group prepared to undertake the necessary primary research will attract the attention of other collaborators who will help out with advice, copy-editing, and Manual of Style and copyright issues.
Even the articles that came out of the recent Global Economics project have received an immense amount of attention and work. The amount of effort that has gone into providing feedback and advice has been extraordinary, not to mention the efforts to edit and format the articles themselves to salvage something from an otherwise disappointing experiment.
Wikipedia's featured content extends beyond featured articles to encompass genres that may be suitable for particular subjects and levels of study. Featured lists comprise less running prose, but must be carefully designed and embedded in the encyclopedia's existing content; featured pictures may be the ideal challenge for students of photography; and students of music or audio-engineering may find the rigors of the featured sounds review process a stimulating test of their skills.
On May 5, MMM students User:eecono, User:Katekonyk, User:Mfreud, and the FA-Team saw their handiwork on Wikipedia's main page, which was thus read by tens of thousands of visitors around the world that day—a testament to their hard work. As Mfreud (Monica Freudenreich) says of their finished product:
Because I have worked so hard writing and re-writing it, I am extremely proud of the finished result. I almost can't believe I helped write it when I look back over it. Term papers I have handed back end up in a binder than eventually sits under my bed and files sit on my computer unopened ever again. This wikipedia page will be seen and likely used by others in the future. After all, I am quite confident that the references list is a comprehensive list of nearly everything published in English on the subject. Any student or person looking to read more about El Señor Presidente no longer has to look any further than our references list. Now that is something truly amazing!
In time, the principal contributors to Mario Vargas Llosa and The General in His Labyrinth hope to have the privilege of seeing their work displayed on the main page. As one student commented in response to feedback generated in the Peer Review and Featured article candidates processes, knowing their classmates had already crossed the finish line, "Their FA star makes me soo jealous. But gives me motivation!" We hope that all three MMM stars, as well as the efforts of the students who produced a host of new GA articles, encourage other school and university projects to reap the rewards of contributing to Wikipedia.
Five users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: CapitalR (nom), Horologium (nom), Peteforsyth (nom), Daniel J. Leivick (nom), and Philosopher (nom).
Seven bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: AndersBot (task request), Ginosbot (task request), Addbot (task request), LaaknorBot (task request), Addbot (task request), FiriBot (task request), and LinkFA-Bot (task request).
Twelve articles were promoted to featured status last week: Oil shale (nom), Yao Ming (nom), Age of Empires (nom), Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (nom), Nebular hypothesis (nom), Interstate 70 in Utah (nom), Degrassi: The Next Generation (nom), 2005 ACC Championship Game (nom), Marjory Stoneman Douglas (nom), and Battle of Tassafaronga (nom).
Twelve lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of tallest buildings in Houston (nom), Metallica discography (nom), List of National Parks of Canada (nom), 1976 Summer Olympics medal count (nom), The Simpsons (season 5) (nom), List of East Carolina Pirates head football coaches (nom), List of Israeli cities (nom), Blue Heelers (season 13) (nom), Timeline of prehistoric Scotland (nom), Bloc Party discography (nom), Philadelphia Phillies seasons (nom), and List of Houston Rockets first and second-round draft picks (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status last week: The Legend of Zelda titles (nom).
One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Wales (nom).
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Prince's Palace of Monaco, BAE Systems, Anabolic steroids, Discovery Expedition, Satyajit Ray, The Third of May 1808, and Huldrych Zwingli.
Two articles were delisted last week: The Office (U.S. TV series) (nom) and Final Fantasy VII (nom).
No lists were delisted last week.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Northern Elephant Seals, Steam turbine, American Black Vulture, Trepanation, Alten Strom canal in Warnemünde, Caterpillar of Spurge Hawk-moth and Upper Antelope Canyon.
No sounds were featured last week.
No featured pictures were demoted last week.
Six pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The Arbitration Committee opened three cases this week, leaving six currently open.
