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.
> 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.
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'.
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].
Of course you can criticize. I find the attitude "you can't complain if you don't improve it" ridiculous.
I checked Cognitive Psychology. Here's the page on "Brain": https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brain. That's not a learning resource, and certainly not a universitary one. I've seen better explanations in toddler's books. And "Socialism" is under Social Sciences.
Teaching is a skill and a job, and above all requires a lot of effort. Passing off some slapdash collection of texts as education is absurd.
If public wikis were really a matter of just anyone contributing any edits they want, then it would just be utter chaos. The entire concept would collapse, under a barrage of bad faith trolling or else good-faith-but-wildly-contradictory edits.
Just as the utopian ideals of open source source generally work only when there is a corporation or foundation funding it, wikis only work when there is a power and control hierarchy. A "priestly caste" emerges, that uses wiki-lawyering and brute force determination to consolidate power and enforce a specific vision for any page.
In other words, contributing to Wikipedia or something like it is such a godforsaken task post-2010, that only the most manically obsessed and dedicated would even try. Some might argue that this is a feature not a bug, I don't know. But it is absolutely valid to criticize a wiki page, without necessarily going to war to get it changed.
First you need to get users, then you need to worry about order and proper governance. This wiki is not failing because of "chaos" and trolls. It is failing due to a lack of a general interest.
Maybe he'll get round to that after he's forked and fixed every non-functional OSS library on Github? The problem is the poorly written abandonware, not the fact that people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request.
This is a project dating back to 2006 to supposedly produce a university standard educational resource. If even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough, the problem isn't that the layman didn't take up the invitation to produce the thousands of pages of academic-level content themselves...
> people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request.
Nice strawman you got there.
It's not like the only way to contribute is by solving the problem in its entirety. I'm just saying that nothing improves if people stop at the criticism.
> This is a project dating back to 2006 (...) even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough.
Put another way, you can say that this is a project that failed to attract people who are interested in contributing. It's not bad because lots of people are working on it and "bad content". It's bad for lack of input. Criticizing for lack of adoption is what feels weird.
> It's not like the only way to contribute is by solving the problem in its entirety
You responded with "go ahead. There's nothing between you and the edit button" to somebody that compared what was actually there unfavourably with a child's book. This isn't an "it's a bit outdated" or "somebody's vandalised the page" problem; literally the only way of solving the problems with that (not unrepresentative) article by editing it would be to rewrite it in its entirety. On Wikimedia's platform, not their own or one of many better-run course creation platforms...
Lack of people interested in contributing is an explanation for lack of quantity of content. But content that makes GPT3-authored content mills look respectable is a quality problem, and that absolutely guarantees lack of adoption[1]. So yes, you absolutely can suggest that the problem with poorly conceived and poorly seeded projects doesn't lie with the critics not getting involved, it lies with the originators not giving them any reason to consider getting involved. And sticking an edit button on things doesn't entitle anyone to a community, not even if they're funded by the Wikimedia Foundation.
[1]tbf the default is for stuff to not get adopted, so questions about attracting contributors are more interestingly framed as why other Wikimedia projects have succeeded (I'd say novelty, fandom and SEO/publicity, not necessarily in that order)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
* 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.