5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 2/21)

Memoirs: the origins of wikieducator

A good place to start is with the original reasons for establishing WikiEducator. I set up the wiki primarily to support the collaborative authoring requirements for free content in support of COL’s facilitation role in guiding the development of the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth ( VUSSC ). VUSSC is a project involving 27 small states, working together as a network, including the development of free content to support the educational needs in these countries. I always hoped that the WikiEducator would grow organically from this small nexus into something bigger. Reading the statistics, this is proving to be true.

I don’t see this early history to be compelling reading for our audience, so I have linked to this content. Nonetheless I have used Ken’s invitation to document the early beginnings of WikiEducator. I cover this under the following headings which you may want to read when you have more time on hand:

• History is important : In order to dispel any new myths which may or may not arise from this post, I feel that I should document some of WikiEducator’s early history …
• The first prototype : Getting back to the inception date of WikiEducator, in preparation for my move to COL in Vancouver, I set up a prototype installation of WikiEducator on a desktop machine…
• Reflections on choosing the domain name : I registered the WikiEducator domain name on 12 February 2006 in New Zealand, which was not put into production until April 2006 when we moved the prototype onto a hosted server… and
• Why not Wikiversity : I should point out that I seriously considered joining forces with Wikiversity in the early days before “going it alone”, so to speak…

History enthusiasts aside, it’s more important to look at the outputs after our first year and the numbers provide some indication of what our community has achieved.

Early signs of exponential growth?

Popularised by Mark Twain , we know that there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, dammed lies, and statistics.”

On the verge of WikiEducator’s first birthday, we have logged about 2.3 million hits. This week we were ranked by Alexa as the 354,568 most visited website. This puts WikiEducator within the top 8% of websites on the planet. That’s not too bad for a small wiki working on the development of free content for education, especially when considering that there are approximately 48 million active websites in the world (according to Netcraft’s 2006 figures). The statistics for March 2006 show an average of 20,000 hits per day from approximately 900 unique visits. We are currently recording visits from 61% of the 193 countries in the world.

An interesting way to look at WikiEducator’s growth is to compare the number of days it has taken to reach cumulative totals in steps of a half-million hits. It took WikiEducator:

• 157 days to reach its first half-million hits
• 02 days to reach the next half-million
• 41 days to reach the 1.5 million mark
• 21 days to reach the 2.0 million threshold

  

An evolving vision

The historical interactions mentioned above have encouraged WikiEducator to think critically about its evolving vision. Particularly with regards to how it differentiates itself from similar projects. Given the magnitude of our collective task to develop a free curriculum by 2015, we cannot afford duplication of effort. Where things stand at the moment — taking into account that WikiEducator is a dynamic community — I think the project differentiates itself in the following ways: