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CosmosWiki was founded on 9 December 2007 at 17:43 UTC+02 (15:43 UTC) by NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://karastathis.org/
The aim of the Cosmos Project is to build a free academic research and scholarship community of independent scholars and professors employed by the academia alike, as well as responsible students. As a free research community, our primary aim is research, but we also do teaching.
The project's domain name is CosmosWiki.org, but the project can be referred by the names: Cosmos, Cosmos Wiki, Cosmos Project, Cosmos Academy, Cosmos Research, or Cosmos Community. At some point we will stick to a more official name, and the alternative names will be used for various sub-groups within Cosmos.
Cosmos is not a university. Cosmos does not grant degrees, and it is not a degree mill. We do have, however, our own honour system and our own credit system, but it's only for internal use. Our honours and credits usually take the form of wiki pages or registries within our wiki, or signatures or endorsements by individual Cosmos members on the first page of your research thesis or other documents proving your capacity to do serious scientific research. Any honour or credit earned within Cosmos is only valid within our community, here in Cosmos. You cannot use anything you gained from Cosmos to make your resume/CV look better. Not only that, but if we discover that you are trying to use your participation in Cosmos in a way that could make any university, school, or employer get a wrong impression about you then we will ban you from our community. We are simply a community of people who love learning on our own, teaching others, and we just have some internal systems to distinguish who is the best among us according to our own criteria. Cosmos is not accredited, by anyone, we are not recognised by anyone and we do not want to be accredited nor recognised by anyone. Cosmos is simply a community founded by an individual, User:NSK, and nothing more. If you came here seeking to buy a degree or to make your CV/resume look nice, please go away.
Cosmos is strictly non-commercial. We sell nothing. We do not accept donations (but if you insist to give personal donations to individual members of the community, you are free to do so if you want). We only welcome your own volunteered time and effort. We also welcome any help with infrastructure, for example if you want to let us use a portion of your own server, but we do not accept hardware donations or any other transfer of ownership. Cosmos could someday become an NGO or not-for-profit association, but for the time being there are no such plans, and its founder would love to see it grow as a self-organised community rather than as an NGO of any kind. We feel that we can do what we want without any need for formal organisation.
Cosmos runs on a personal server of User:NSK, and as such it is considered a personal website, in which you are kindly invited to participate to create a free academic community and re-invent the academia with a free "open-source" ethic.