User:JWSchmidt/Blog/5 February 2007

Featured content  I decided that Content development, Schools and Topics need to be solidified and the specific "School:" pages to be featured need to be cleaned up before actually doing featured schools on the main page. For now I am satisfied with having the main page link to portal pages that have featured content in the main namespace and links to the content development pages.

Research policy  A more pressing concern is to draft some research guidelines at the multilingual Wikiversity hub as was requested by the Board.

Allowing original research within a WikiMedia Foundation project is a major change for the Foundation. This requires a written plan that will be evaluated before original research is actually approved as a component of Wikiversity. We need to invent a system to deal with the potential problems that can come from allowing original research activities. This process started six years ago when Wikipedia started. The decision was made to not allow original research at Wikipedia because of the danger of editors trying to include bogus ideas in the encyclopedia. During the past 5 months there has been discussion,, , , of the potential problems that would arise from including original research within the Wikiversity project. We now have months of experience that show the types of original research projects that are likely to be started by Wikiversity participants. I think we now know enough to write a first draft of Wikiversity policies that would govern research activities within Wikiversity.