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Friday, August 11, 2006

Wikiversity, Wikibooks

Posted by Bill Benzon on 08/11/06 at 10:43 AM

News from the Wikiverse:

This weekend (August 4th-8th) Jimbo Wales announced that the wikiversity project has been officially approved by the board, and the project is going to be moved to its own server within the month. Initially, there will be 3 languages, and the project will be in a “beta” version for a 6 month trial period.

Wikiversity is currtently being hosted by Wikibooks, “a collection of free, open-content textbooks that you can edit.” Here’s the TOC for the book on Literary Criticism. Here’s the introduction:

Traditional literary criticism is a system of analyzing, reveiwing, and critiquing a work of literature (the subject). Literary criticism is typically performed from the perspective of a particular school of criticism, the purpose is to analyze the subject’s relevance and quality from that school’s ‘viewpoint’. The major schools of literary criticism include, but are not limited to; formal criticism, historical criticism, psychological criticism, and archetypal criticism. Each of these schools addresses the subject in a different manner, and should be taught individually. However, there are certain underlying skills associated with literary criticism which must be understood before learning each of the schools.

They’ve made a good start on a Muggles Guide to Harry Potter, and annotations to Atlas Shrugged. There’s much more there. But most is still in prospect.

Comments

Fascinating project. Thanks for pointing it out!

By Robert on 08/11/06 at 08:30 PM | Permanent link to this comment

A bad idea that just got worse.

By on 08/12/06 at 11:53 AM | Permanent link to this comment

This project looks really promising. I was hoping that it would get underway soon!

By Justin on 08/12/06 at 10:40 PM | Permanent link to this comment

It couldn’t hurt, could it?

Wikibooks works for some types of content. Imagine a hoard of thousands of mathematicians and students scoping for errors in an Intro Calculus book, which can be instantly corrected. It’s a pretty effective way to proof and edit a book. Who’s to say it could not work as a sort of self teaching system on those fabled $100 lap tops in third world countries. I say, score one for the hive mind. I’ll admit I now check wikipedia first when I am interested in a new subject, if only for the links to some authoritative sources.

On the other hand…
“Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence”

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902

By Christopher Hellstrom on 08/12/06 at 11:43 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Wikiversity, Wikibooks

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