Why is Wikiversity? I keep trying to answer this question for myself. When I'm at work and trying to look busy without actually doing work, my location of choice is Wikipedia and the extended wiki-verse. Wikinews, wikidata, it's all good fun clicking around aimlessly until I build up the motivation to do some more real work. But the ugly duckling that always stumps me on these dalliances is Wikiversity.
On the face of it, there are a few wiki projects that seem unaligned to Wiki’s overall goal of making knowledge widely accessible. Rather than collecting already extant knowledge into human readable databases, Wikivoyage and Wikiversity (and arguably MediaWiki I guess) are instead places where knowledge is ‘shaped’ into a new product. Wikivoyage provides travel advice, and Wikiversity provides ‘free learning tools’ such as learning resources, projects and resources.
In practice, it's hard to find much of worth on Wikiversity. Despite claiming to have thousands of resources, Wikiversity feels like a rotting carcass full of pages untouched in decades, with halfhearted attempts at lessons sloppily mushed together. I have done multiple dives into areas I am familiar with, and have been continually disappointed. A few examples:
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Japanese: after laboriously searching for the Japanese portal (a landing page of sorts) I was provided with a to do list, some materials to refer to, and a list of hopeful participants who all date back to 2008. A click around the materials shows incorrect information being presented without comment - for example, claiming only men and boys use the pronoun ‘boku’.
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Geography: weirdly, there's a geography ‘class’ with quizzes and multiple pages, but it's literally just a word salad of countries’ capitals, sizes and biomes. No mention of demographics, migration or really anything you would expect to learn in a geography class.
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Graphic Design: searching ‘graphic design' in the search bar provides a list of resources, some unfinished and others painfully useless. The information here is so simple as to be pointless: for example, ’logos are able to take all manner of shapes and sizes. The most common shapes are rectangular and circular, quite possibly because they are the most unobtrusive shapes to use.’ I feel like I'm learning about graphic design from the perspective of an alien.
There is some stuff of value here, to be clear; object oriented programming, for example, has plenty of information provided in an unpleasant but functional manner. But the vast majority of Wikiversity is people who aren't teachers trying to teach. What is lost on this project is that teaching is Hard. Variables any teacher would immediately consider - the age of a learner, for instance - is rarely touched on. There are no teacher notes, and assignments lack marking rubrics. The traditional Wikipedia page setup doesn't work well for this purpose either. Wikipedia is expressedly nonlinear, but a lesson plan is by it's very nature aggressively cumulative. A learner can easily skip around on a Wikiversity lesson and often it's hard to even tell what the intended path IS.
The problems I list exist because anybody can contribute to Wikiversity. This is one of Wikipedia's core strengths, along with its dedication to exhaustingly thorough administration and charitable status. But in education, lesson plans don't really work this way. They're constructed for a context - a time period, a demographic, a situation. Wikiversity cannot provide a lesson plan for everyone, so it provides a lesson plan for an imagined someone who is usually self-guided, understands Wiki’s idiosyncrasies, and has no physical mentor. The result is resources are vague, obtuse and quickly outdated.
If there was no online resource that provided online lesson plans, Wikiversity would be a good idea. But MIT open courseware, not to mention Merlot and countless MOOCs, has rendered Wikiversity utterly pointless. I don't really understand why it still exists at all, considering the most recent activity I can find from it is a few blips in 2024, which is probably why it fascinates me so. A very well intentioned project that has been utterly outclassed. If I were mr. Wiki and I ran the Wikimedia foundation, I would pull the plug on Wikiversity immediately, salvage anything passable, and ask Merlot if they want it, which they probably wouldn't.
While I'm in control of Mr. Wiki - if Wiki really wants a project where lesson plans are available in the public domain, they should decide whether they want to provide lesson plans or actual textbook-style lessons and focus on wiki specific learning areas. A course on how to use wikidata, for example, would be invaluable as someone who has tried and failed to understand SPARQL. Similar guides on Wikipedia's arbitration system or statistics use would be both interesting and directly useful, far more so than a stub about graphic design.