Using Wikiversity/What is Wikiversity

Wikiversity is an active-learning community where everyone can learn from each other through discussion and learning projects. People of all ages from all over the world come to Wikiversity to participate in the learning community.

History

Wikiversity's community initially developed within the Wikibooks project. Some people within the Wikibooks community sought to create focus groups that could be used to organize works and help people collaborate on common goals. Study aids, books for learners, books for professionals, books for children, research, and works useful for classroom use were among the initial targets for these focus groups. "Wikiversity" was initially created as part of the effort to create works useful for classroom use, but was later expanded by a movement within the Wikibooks community that sought to expand Wikibooks' scope beyond textbooks to include hosting of additional types of learning resources. Karl Wick, the founder of Wikibooks, started Some ideas about Wikiversity.

Wikiversity was created as an independent project in August 2006.

Scope

Wikiversity is as much about building a community as it is about learning and research. You are encouraged to develop and pursue your own learning or research goals. You are encouraged to ask and answer questions. You are encouraged to share what you know and what you would like to know. No subject is out of scope.

Wikiversity hosts flexible educational resources for use in multiple contexts. Wikibooks develops textbooks that ultimately are for use off the shelf as-is in a specific context while Wikisource hosts previously published works that are either out of copyright or have been released under a compatible copyleft license. Wikipedia another project is building an encyclopedia of human knowledge. The educational resources that Wikiversity hosts may be useful to teachers and students alike. We believe that as learning resources develop course work will be shared with other communities and projects.