6 ms·

Wikiversity

149 points by RafelMri 4y ago

Klasiaster 4y ago
Actually a nice idea to make lecturers collaborate and share more: Maybe it would help if the website could be used by university courses, e.g., by allowing to overlay custom course infos or modify sections.
arisbe__ 4y ago
Check out wikisource too if you aren't aware. I use it often for philosophical references and quotes (I'm not an academic).
thealistra 4y ago
How is one suppose to use this? I tried finding something on comp-sci - no mention on main page or courses list. I went into medicine and there are no courses and list of random resources where one is about mammals. Doesn’t seem like a structured set of data that you could actually learn from as you would do on a university
- crazygringo 4y ago
  I just tried clicking "Browse" (second item in left bar, below "Main page") and "Computer science" is in the middle of the first box: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Computer_Science https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Computer_Science Which leads to "Core Courses" and "Full Course Listing". It also works if on the main page, the middle of the top box lists subject areas, you can click "Technology" which has a subcategory "Computing" which lists "Computer science". It also works if you click on "Schools" in the main page, which lists "School:Computer Science". I agree it should maybe be more primary how to access the subject hierarchy. But it is there in multiple ways.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Realistically, wikiversity is the wikimedia project that has taken off the least (maybe except wikinews and wikispecies). The amount of content is relatively small. If you want a structured learning resource, i think wikibooks is a better bet.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > The amount of content is relatively small. And a substantial amount of the material that is there is bizarre content that's unlikely to be useful to teachers or researchers -- for example, the site hosts "courses" for topics such as "Dominant group", "Intentional Evolution", "Finding Courage", and "ACR" ("Action + Circumstances → Reaction"). Without pointing any fingers, I get the feeling that a substantial amount of the content on the site is the work of a couple of users treating the site as their personal blog, rather than an attempt to build content as a community. There's very little visible collaboration.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Wikiversity is a bit of a "catchall" project, it gets used for hosting all kinds of resources of educational interest that wouldn't be accepted on other Wiki sister sites.
texaslonghorn5 4y ago
If there was a "sitemap" in the form of a course catalog or sample degree plan, linking to each course, that would make this incredibly easy to follow.
c7b 4y ago
It sounds like a cool idea if I get it right (organize links to wikipedia articles in a way that could correspond to a curriculum), but the quality of the curation at least for mathematics looks abysmal. Here are some of the top-level categories: * Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) - 46 pages. * Set theory - 3 pages * Theory of summation of natural numbers - empty This fails to be useful for students at so many levels. The entries are at completely inconsistent levels of granularity or concepts, it fails to make any meaningful selection or ranking by importance (another example, it has a top-level category for Chaos Theory but none for Dynamical Systems). And, most importantly, it doesn't correspond to how university curriculums are structured and doesn't work as a useful guide for self-study. But yeah, it's a wiki, so I guess I shouldn't complain but instead just contribute to improving it.
- User23 4y ago
  > Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) He was something of an intellectual generalist sure. Nevertheless his work in logic was world class. For example he independently discovered the universal and existential quantifiers about the same time Frege did.
  - c7b 4y ago
    Sure, this wasn't meant as a judgement. Logic straddles mathematics and philosophy (and CS), and being considered the founder of an important philosophical school is arguably one of the biggest achievements possible for a scholar, so that's where I'd put the emphasis. The more important point was how bizarre it is to single him out on the landing page for 'Mathematics'.
    - User23 4y ago
      Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbation of their fellows, but they're rare and they're not who most people think of when they hear the word. Peirce is probably the greatest American-born logician to live, and probably deserves to be on the short list of great American-born scientists (broadly construed in the 19th century and earlier sense) like Franklin and Gibbs, but yeah I agree that he's an odd choice for the first name on a mathematics landing page. Maybe one day I'll write a graphical Prolog dialect based on his existential graphs[1]. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm
joshxyz 4y ago
interesting courses page confused me a bit though, i really thought they counting animal cats per course https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Courses https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Courses
- letaem77 4y ago
  12 & 6
nashashmi 4y ago
The front page seems to embody alt university courses. This seems like another agenda driven project. Wikiversity has been a long project. I saw this back on 2006. Much of the original vision behind the project is gone. Instead of a learning and certificate course of existing public courses, this is a Frankenstein version of some other vision I don't seem to understand.
Bystander22 4y ago
Interestingly, the entry for "Open Educational Resources" (which is what they are building) is primarily a list of links to other sites that have more developed offerings... https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources

149 points by RafelMri 4y ago

Actually a nice idea to make lecturers collaborate and share more: Maybe it would help if the website could be used by university courses, e.g., by allowing to overlay custom course infos or modify sections.

arisbe__ 4y ago

Check out wikisource too if you aren't aware. I use it often for philosophical references and quotes (I'm not an academic).

thealistra 4y ago

How is one suppose to use this? I tried finding something on comp-sci - no mention on main page or courses list. I went into medicine and there are no courses and list of random resources where one is about mammals. Doesn’t seem like a structured set of data that you could actually learn from as you would do on a university

crazygringo 4y ago
I just tried clicking "Browse" (second item in left bar, below "Main page") and "Computer science" is in the middle of the first box: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Computer_Science https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Computer_Science Which leads to "Core Courses" and "Full Course Listing". It also works if on the main page, the middle of the top box lists subject areas, you can click "Technology" which has a subcategory "Computing" which lists "Computer science". It also works if you click on "Schools" in the main page, which lists "School:Computer Science". I agree it should maybe be more primary how to access the subject hierarchy. But it is there in multiple ways.
bawolff 4y ago
Realistically, wikiversity is the wikimedia project that has taken off the least (maybe except wikinews and wikispecies). The amount of content is relatively small. If you want a structured learning resource, i think wikibooks is a better bet.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > The amount of content is relatively small. And a substantial amount of the material that is there is bizarre content that's unlikely to be useful to teachers or researchers -- for example, the site hosts "courses" for topics such as "Dominant group", "Intentional Evolution", "Finding Courage", and "ACR" ("Action + Circumstances → Reaction"). Without pointing any fingers, I get the feeling that a substantial amount of the content on the site is the work of a couple of users treating the site as their personal blog, rather than an attempt to build content as a community. There's very little visible collaboration.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Wikiversity is a bit of a "catchall" project, it gets used for hosting all kinds of resources of educational interest that wouldn't be accepted on other Wiki sister sites.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago

If there was a "sitemap" in the form of a course catalog or sample degree plan, linking to each course, that would make this incredibly easy to follow.

c7b 4y ago

It sounds like a cool idea if I get it right (organize links to wikipedia articles in a way that could correspond to a curriculum), but the quality of the curation at least for mathematics looks abysmal. Here are some of the top-level categories: * Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) - 46 pages. * Set theory - 3 pages * Theory of summation of natural numbers - empty This fails to be useful for students at so many levels. The entries are at completely inconsistent levels of granularity or concepts, it fails to make any meaningful selection or ranking by importance (another example, it has a top-level category for Chaos Theory but none for Dynamical Systems). And, most importantly, it doesn't correspond to how university curriculums are structured and doesn't work as a useful guide for self-study. But yeah, it's a wiki, so I guess I shouldn't complain but instead just contribute to improving it.

User23 4y ago
> Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) He was something of an intellectual generalist sure. Nevertheless his work in logic was world class. For example he independently discovered the universal and existential quantifiers about the same time Frege did.
- c7b 4y ago
  Sure, this wasn't meant as a judgement. Logic straddles mathematics and philosophy (and CS), and being considered the founder of an important philosophical school is arguably one of the biggest achievements possible for a scholar, so that's where I'd put the emphasis. The more important point was how bizarre it is to single him out on the landing page for 'Mathematics'.
  - User23 4y ago
    Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbation of their fellows, but they're rare and they're not who most people think of when they hear the word. Peirce is probably the greatest American-born logician to live, and probably deserves to be on the short list of great American-born scientists (broadly construed in the 19th century and earlier sense) like Franklin and Gibbs, but yeah I agree that he's an odd choice for the first name on a mathematics landing page. Maybe one day I'll write a graphical Prolog dialect based on his existential graphs[1]. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm

joshxyz 4y ago

interesting courses page confused me a bit though, i really thought they counting animal cats per course https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Courses https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Courses

letaem77 4y ago
12 & 6

nashashmi 4y ago

The front page seems to embody alt university courses. This seems like another agenda driven project. Wikiversity has been a long project. I saw this back on 2006. Much of the original vision behind the project is gone. Instead of a learning and certificate course of existing public courses, this is a Frankenstein version of some other vision I don't seem to understand.

Bystander22 4y ago

Interestingly, the entry for "Open Educational Resources" (which is what they are building) is primarily a list of links to other sites that have more developed offerings... https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources