Wikiversity talk:Learning community

Imported from the meta wiki

This page is informed by my research on Wikipedia and its sister projects, which culminated in my masters dissertation. I presented a shorter paper at Wikimania 2005. Details can be found from my Wikipedia user page. However, I'd encourage anyone with a idea of how this page should be to contribute to its content - it's still very sketchy. --Cormaggio @ 10:47, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

wikipedia-wikiversity links
Sometimes wikipedia articles or groups of articles turn into exciting community learning projects. However, the emergence of this kind of community learning within wikipedia is a relatively rare epiphenomenon that is not adequately supported at this time. The general wikipedia community is still learning ways engage and empower editors who wish to become part of these spontaneous learning communities.

I have been thinking about an organized role for wikiversity as a facilitator of community learning projects. People who come to wikipedia could be encouraged to ask questions and demand more than what is in existing wikipedia articles. How could wikiversity play a role in this? I have been thinking about what should be said on the navigation boxes that will link wikipedia pages to wikiversity. First, such navigation boxes could encourage wikipedia users to ask questions. Wikipedia could provide "courses" in how to do literature review and source checking for topics that appear on wikipedia pages. For example, many people come to wikipedia looking for information about a particular health problem or disease. Wikiversity could have a course that empowers people who seek medical information by showing them how to access information that goes beyond what is in the wikipedia articles for health topics. Such wikiversity courses would start as "service courses" that function to improve wikipedia. From this service function, wikiversity "course pages" could grow to have detailed guides to publications and sources relevant to specific topics and contain much more detail than anyone wants in an encyclopedia. These "living reviews" of wikipedia topics might initially be a major part of the content of wikiversity. Wikipedia users who are really interested in a particular topic could be encouraged to compile subsets of the wikiversity knowledge base into formal peer-reviewed publications about topics and also to work on related textbooks at wikibooks. Textbook construction would be a natural part of the wikiversity community (see). Wikiversity could serve as a nexus for coordinating many learning and research-related activities that would benefit other wiki projects. Wikiversity would become a support system for learning communities that would interdigitate with all other wikimedia projects. --JWSurf 02:13, 5 November 2005 (UTC)