Wikiversity:Wikiversity Day/choices

There has been a small amount of discussion about a global Wikiversity Day for all WVs.

August 15th
"August 15th" proponents argue that August 15th, 2006, is the appropriate date, as this is the day on which Wikiversity first became an independent website in its own right as a project alongside other Wikimedia projects.

As support for this view, the sentence "January 15 is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this date in the year 2001, the wiki-based Wikipedia project went public after spending five days on Nupedia" is used from Wikipedia, which uses the criterion of being an independent website under the name of Wikipedia. Previous states of (semi-)existence are discounted.

Further support for this view is offered by analogy with human birthdays. We do not date our own existence as human beings from the dates of our conception or from the dates on which our parents first glanced at each other with a twinkle in their eye. Our birthdays are those dates on which we achieve independent life after a considerable period of preparation and development.

Other dates
Proponents of other dates point out that Wikiversity existed in some form or other as a project within Wikibooks for two years or so prior to this. Suggested criteria include:
 * the date on which Wikiversity statistics first record a contributor (February 2002)
 * the date of the first edit on Wikibooks (22nd August 2003).
 * the date of the first use of the word "Wikiversity" (could be found by a web search ?).
 * the date on which the idea of an education-specific Wikimedia project first formed as the twinkle in the eye of an editor.
 * the date of the approval of the Wikiversity project by the foundation (30th July 2006).
 * the date of the first proposal to the Wikimedia foundation - which was rejected (13th November 2005).


 * For me, the above analogy of the birth process is spot on - we should mark Wikiversity day as our birth-ie launch-day, not from when it started as an idea (fyi, see m:Talk:Wikiversity/Old and m:Talk:Wikiversity/Archive_2). And it was never much more than a placeholder for future work, while being "incubated" on Wikibooks. Cormaggio talk 16:32, 7 August 2008 (UTC)