Is Wikiversity a project worth having?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Some editors doubt Wikiversity is a project worth having. Are they right?

Wikiversity is a project worth having

Pro

• Pro Unlike Wikipedia and Wikibooks, Wikiversity explicitly allows original research and does not narrowly constrain the type of content, e.g. by requiring it to be encyclopedic. This creates unique differentiator for Wikiversity, to have quasi-encyclopedic articles and book-like content that contains a mixture of inline-referenced content with element of original research. And because of the element of original research, neither Wikipedia nor Wikibooks fit the bill, at least based on their policies. Admittedly, the potential of Wikiversity has not been properly tapped into so far, possibly in part since Wikipedia acts in part as Wikiversity, having many poorly sourced yet interesting articles with interesting arguably non-encyclopedic content.
• Pro Letting students and other people hone their writing and wiki editing skills (including wiki markup and markup for inline references) seems worth the cost of the servers and the time of the rather few volunteer regular administrators and editors. Put differently, the cost of the writing-and-editing wiki sandbox/playground services provided is probably reasonably low.
  •  Comment If this is part of Wikiversity criteria for inclusion for the mainspace, it should be explicitly codified so that all contributors know that mainspace is intended also for low-quality wholly-unreferenced nearly-worthless writeups. This idea seems contradicted by WV:Verifiability.
• Pro Expanding on the sandbox/playground idea, some editors may find Wikipedia too intimidating and start in Wikiversity, and then graduate to become Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. content contributors or at least vandalism reverters, inline reference editors or administrators.
  • Objection Wikiversity is not engaging enough for this be the case or a potential.
  • Objection There are no known and likely only exceptional few cases of that.
• Pro Wikiversity hosts Wikijournals, which are peer-reviewed. This content alone makes Wikiversity worthwhile.
  • Objection There are very few studies in it and those included are not really notable or including major novel findings.
• Pro Among the English projects, the page view statistics of Wikiversity is better than Wikinews and on the same decimal order of magnitude as Wikiquote and Wikisource; Wikibooks has about 6 times many pageviews. This suggests considerable interest in Wikiversity, although Wikipedia beats them all by a huge margin.
  • Objection People may just come here by accident, or don't find what they were looking for / anything useful. Pageviews without further analysis is not a good metric or indicator – one for example would need to look at which pages get read and hypothesize the likely reasons for that.
• Pro Expanding on the above, as for page views, the English Wikiversity easily beats non-Wikipedia projects of smaller languages, e.g. Danish.
  • Objection It is not clear how much one should read into these page view statistics: Malagasy Wiktionary has approximately as many page views as the Danish Wiktionary, yet Malagasy Wiktionary contains largely a mixture of correct and incorrect material for many languages created by a bot from other Wiktionaries using rather naive heuristics. One should also consider user satisfaction and not just page views.

Con

• Con During its over 17 years of existence (per revision history of Wikiversity:Main Page), Wikiversity has produced little of use. Some of the pages that are of use are not really original research and could as well be in Wikibooks.
  • Objection The page view statistics seem to refute the little-of-use hypothesis. The English Wikiversity page views are about 2.4 times less than the English Wikisource pageviews and about 5.5 times less than the English Wikibooks pageviews, not bad for a project that is allegedly worthless. Comparing the project to Wikipedia sets a very high bar; even the 2nd most visited Wikimedia Foundation English-language project, the English Wiktionary, sees a mere 1/100 of the Wikipedia page views.
    • Objection Given the poor ratio of Wikipedia page views and Wikiversity page views (factor of about 4000), one has to wonder how many users land in Wikiversity by error when they thought they were going to Wikipedia.
• Con "Wikiversity has no clearly defined mission"
  • Objection Even if Wikiversity does not have a clearly defined mission, it does have a defined mission, per Wikiversity:Approved Wikiversity project proposal#Mission. Thus, it does have a mission formulated, but it is not clear how to apply it in practice. However, this problem does not suffice for the conclusion that Wikiversity is not worth it; it may mean that Wikiversity contributors can find ways to create something meaningful within a mission as vague as the one existing.
• Con "its [Wikiversity's] scope overlaps with every WMF project, since all WMF projects are educational!"
  • Objection As long as Wikiversity has unique differentiators within the "educational" umbrella, an overlap should not be a problem.
• Con "Wikiversity has become a haven for users banned from other Wikimedia projects".
  • Objection If these users create useful content, so much better. If they misbehave, they can be blocked.
• Con If Wikiversity really took off, it would be hosting plentiful courses and materials on a broad range of subjects, often supported by people employed by universities. What happened instead is that people started dedicated websites hosting instances of the MediaWiki wiki engine, e.g. cppreference.com, Rosetta Code and many others.
  • Objection That seems true enough, but even if Wikiversity did not really properly take off, it may still be a project worth having, a project worth the money paid for the servers and the time and efforts of the volunteers, who are rather few.
• Con Wikiversity has essentially the same user interface and technologies as Wikipedia. The difference is essentially just the content and the usefulness of such is limited due to that.
  • Objection Other very useful websites have approximately the save user interface and technology as Wikipedia, e.g. cppreference.com or Rosetta Code. That does not limit the usefulness of these websites; they are useful within their scope.
  • Objection The difference in content is not just; it is the main thing. Thus, the difference between Wikipedia and, say, Wikisource and Wikibooks is also "just the content", not the MediaWiki technology.

Page view table

As an appendix, a page view table, June 2015-Jan 2024:

Project	Page views	Wikinews multiplier	Wikiversity multiplier
en.wikipedia.org	784,420,525,588	7584	4104
en.wiktionary.org	7,109,161,216	69	37.2
en.wikibooks.org	1,051,183,532	10	5.5
en.wikiquote.org	662,125,985	6	3.5
en.wikisource.org	458,793,735	4	2.4
en.wikiversity.org	191,098,681	2	1.0
en.wikinews.org	103,428,332	1	0.5

See also

• Wikiversity:What is Wikiversity?
• Wikiversity:History of Wikiversity

Further reading

• Meta: Requests for comment/Shut down Wikiversity, 2010, meta.wikimedia.org
• Meta: No to Wikiversity, 2005-2006, meta.wikimedia.org
• Why did Wikiversity fail?, quora.com