Wikiversity—School:Philosophy

Found through a series of links from the ‘Edupunk’ entry on Wikipedia, Wikiversity—and in particular its School of Philosophy—is an interesting resource. An ‘open’ university in the most fundamental sense of the word, it is a participatory university that collects free resources to enable anyone to learn about, conceivably any topic. The problem, at least at this stage, seems to be that topics of interest to most editors (like Web design) have much more comprehensive entries¹, while the Existentialism topic is, to say the least, in its infancy. The Intro to Phil page, while relatively more developed, cannot function as a sole education resource, and (understandably, per the Wikpedia/Wikiversity ethos) contains very few external links. Thus, while neither of these resources are of much use to anyone wanting to study any kind of philosophy in-depth, they do provide something that most other resources seem to be sorely lacking: a working framework and an outline for learning progress—as opposed to the haphazard loosely gathered materials found elsewhere. Perhaps in time, like Wikipedia itself, Wikiversity will embrace a wide range of subjects, attract a larger number of committed editors and become a much more useful resource.

1. This is often referred to as Wikipedia’s “nerd bias“.