Now, I know that Wikipedia has become one of the most successful web-based projects out there, if not *the* most. That is undeniable.

However, while I do think that its latest pet project, Wikiversity (beta), is admirable for its goals, I can’t help thinking that its going a tad overboard.

Education – from a pedagogical standpoint – needs some sort of rigidity or enforcement, and Wikiversity – even with its omnilingual access – seems to be a bit too fluid at this stage to be put forward as a serious institution of education for the masses.

Maybe its because of the current lack of engaging, hands-on projects which would allow for Wikiversity to be more than just a repository of documentation.

Or, maybe the goal, or eventual niche, of Wikiversity, combined with Wikimedia’s other projects, is to be a repository of free, open, unlicensed documentation that can be used by the current institutions of the world, from the low-end local tech schools to the higher-end liberal-arts campuses. God knows that textbooks are a pain in the ass to buy, then sell in order to buy other books for the next quarter or semester, and so on. Plus, we could take to mind that colleges of whatever stripe have to pay unnecessary amounts of money to the authors and publishers of those textbooks for intellectual property and publishing copyright (even PDFs aren’t spared).

If that were the case, and it was embraced as an alternative route by these colleges, then I could imagine that the tuition at the highest-end colleges (say, Oglethorpe University), could come down quite a tad.

Maybe there’s room for Wikiversity after all?