Wiki Community College

My idea is called the "Wiki Community College" (WCC), and it consists of the following: creating a free college, whose curriculum will be determined entirely by the users. It will issue degrees, and all papers and essays needed to complete these degrees will be reviewed and graded by the users as well. Naturally, this institution and the degrees that it issues will be completely unaccredited, and will simply be for the prestige, and for the knowledge itself.

Courses + Curriculum

A user who wishes to recieve a WCC degree will read the main page for that degree, and there, they will find out what subjects the community has determined they should master before they can "graduate". For example, a user who wants a WCC degree in Art History would read the main page for that degree and perhaps find a list as follows: Pre-historic Art, Western Art history, Eastern Art history, Aesthetics, Art criticism, Contextualism, Formalism, and so on... Any student wishing to gain a degree in this subject would then be required to submit essays on some or all of these subjects (whether some or all would naturally be determined by the community also). These essays would, in turn, be reviewed by other users (maybe reviewing a certain number of essays in your chosen field would itself be a requirement to gain a degree), and graded by them as well (this grading process brings up some thorny issues, but i believe they can be overcome).

-Further refinement of grading essays: Rather than being "graded" per se, a user would post his sumbission to the appropriate wiki (Wikinews for journalism, Wikispecies for zoology, Uncyclopedia for comedy, etc) along with a link back to a category here at WCC. After a reasonable amount of time (1 month?), users would then grade them, but really all that would be necissary would be reading the discussion page, and comparing the original version with the 1-month later version. It should be obvious how accurate and comprehensive an article is this way, and there would be a nice list of links of papers to review on the WCC mainpage --Jayseki 20:47, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

-When there is already a good article on the appropriate wiki, then the article would be only posted on the WCC site --Jayseki 02:14, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Another possibility that i feel would be interesting would be to make users stay current in their field of study; so a user that, for example, gains a degree in Library Science, might later be required to pen an additional essay in the "Emergence of Wikis", if the community adds this to the curriculum at a later date. This would have the effect of making sure that degree holders are up-to-date in their fields. Users would also have the opportunity to propose new degree programs. Of course i hardly need to mention what a high value Wikipedia will have in writing essays, and that bibliographies will naturally contain many many links to it.

Degrees

As stated above, these degrees would be valueless (but not worthless!), and solely for the prestige and recognition of the community, and although it initially may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it has the potential to mean something more if it catches on. Of course, it is easy to imagine further additions to WCC, such as PhDs or professorships.

Distinction from Wikiversity

It should be obvious by now that this proposal is significantly different from Wikiversity, and I feel that my proposal, for one thing, is in a much more lighthearted vein.

any feedback will be greatly appreciated, thank you for your time --Jayseki 06:17, 14 June 2007 (UTC) (Please put it on the discussion page --Jayseki 16:56, 20 June 2007 (UTC))

Demo

A demo is available at our page on the Wikimedia Incubator.