Wikiversity:What is Wikiversity?/Draft

This page is for drafting proposed changes to Wikiversity:What is Wikiversity?

Wikiversity is a community effort of amateurs and professional academics (see here) working together to learn and facilitate others' learning. Wikiversity provides open access to education in any field for anyone who is interested regardless of age, ethnicity, educational attainment or social status. Wikiversity invites teachers of educational institutions to develop and improve educational resources, and encourages them to leave feedback and suggestions for existing educational resources. Wikiversity invites students and you to ask questions, discuss topics that interest you, and to participate in learning and in the learning process. Wikiversity's philosophy is that you are a valuable and irreplaceable commodity.

What are you?

Wikiversity is a participation-driven open educational resource (OER), personal learning environment (PLE), and learning community.

What this means for you is Wikiversity can be used by you to:

1. Learn any topic that might be taught by a modern class.
2. Teach any topic that might be learned in a modern class.
3. Explore, examine, research, and discuss any topic.
4. Share your learning, teaching, and research experiences.
5. Ask questions.
6. Search for, document, and explain answers.
7. Experiment with new ways to facilitate learning.
8. Learn by doing or engage in active learn.

What do you include?

Wikiversity aims to include most things found in a modern class or can be useful for facilitating learning:

• Lessons
• Tutorials
• Assignments
• Assessments
• Exercises
• Quizzes
• Reports
• Courses
• Demonstrations
• Learning journals
• Research papers
• Academic papers
• Theses
• Essays
• Lectures
• Speeches
• Abstracts
• Treatise
• Dissertations
• Academic discussions
• Academic proceedings
• Seminars
• Dialogues
• Rhetorics
• Analyses
• Proofs
• Activities
• Games

As long as works are honest they are generally within Wikiversity's scope. You can help to keep resources and other participants honest by asking questions, seeking clarification, and requesting more details. Generally when a resource does appear to misrepresent itself, the solution is to discuss it and when possible cite sources.

What do you exclude?

Wikiversity aims to exclude most things which do not facilitate learning and works that could benefit from collaboration at sibling projects.

• Encyclopedias (see Wikipedia)
• Dictionaries (see Wiktionary)
• Thesaurus (see Wikisaurus)
• Source texts (see Wikisource)
• Books (see Wikibooks)
• News (see Wikinews)

Wikiversity aims to be inclusive when possible, and as such Wikiversity may at times host works which facilitate learning and overlap in scope with works at sibling projects, but which are excluded or not yet ready for inclusion at sibling projects for one reason or another. Examples include specialized dictionaries and thesauruses, books which explore new ideas or unverified claims, articles that include new research on a topic, and class projects.