Wikiversity:WMF outreach

This is a project to encourage and facilitate outreach to other WMF users. [Wikiversity:WMF outreach This] is the original inspiration.

It is not uncommon that users who get in trouble on other WMF wikis would find that they can do what they want to do here, with positive results. We can, here and on subpages, report our experiences with recruiting users for Wikiversity, and share ideas. Wikiversity has a reputation as the Island of Banned Users. That's an exaggeration, but there is something to it. Wikiversity allows Original Research and encourages discussion of topics, properly placed, and with civility. Experts familiar with a field, knowing the real state of the field, which can be some years in advance of what has appeared in Wikipedia Reliable Source, can be frustrated on Wikipedia, and wonder why people can't just read the latest research papers, as they do!

Wikiversity is not an encyclopedia, I've been saying it is more like a university, as the name implies, and the site is the university library. University libraries can be very, very deep, they are used for research and they contain original research. A university will run seminars where topics are discussed in depth, students can say stupid things, from which they and others learn, etc. (A student's "stupid mistake" is often being made by many others. The student who dares to express it should be commended, because the correction will educate many others who didn't have the courage to speak up! A good teacher will always thank students for sticking their neck out to express their views. Especially if they are wrong!)

For lots of reasons, then, Wikiversity is a place where productive work -- and play! -- can be done by people who have difficulty elsewhere. I've already seen how encouraging a very young user to create user space "play" resources on Wikiversity has aided the other wikis by shifting the user away from what was seen as vandalism elsewhere. (There were many socks and blocks, this seven-year-old had discovered that IP blocks went away when he rebooted his modem. Like magic.) And the young user is then learning wikitext, creating writing, and learning to respect community norms. It's win-win.

/Interwiki links/
In theory, where Wikiversity has a resource on a topic, an interwiki link can be placed on relevant articles on Wikipedia. See w:Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects.

I did this a couple of times. In one case, it was reverted on the claim that the Wikiversity resource was "self-published." But that argument, of course, would apply as well to any Wikipedia article! It was also incorrect. External links can be to self-published sites, the sole question is utility (and satisfaction of certainly other External Link guidelines). I was a COI editor there, so I didn't insist. But someone else could. On the subpage /Interwiki links/, people may suggest interwiki links, or report that they have placed them, so we can watch what happens. --Abd 14:23, 17 August 2011 (UTC)