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Wikibooks

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Wikibooks logo

Wikibooks, previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks, is a wiki for the creation of books. It is a Wikimedia Foundation project.

History

Growth of the six largest Wikibooks sites (by language).

Started on July 10, 2003, the project is a collection of free textbooks and annotated texts that are written collaboratively on the website. The site is a wiki, meaning that anyone can edit book modules without their contributions being subject to review before modifications are accepted.

The project was opened in response to a request by Wikipedia's Karl Wick for a place to start building open-content textbooks such as organic chemistry and physics in order to reduce the costs and other limitations on learning materials.

Content

While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free-content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. As with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain the property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible to allow for further collaboration.

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource because content on Wikibooks is expected to be significantly changed by participants. Raw source documents such as the original text of Shakespearian plays should be hosted on Wikisource instead.

The site is working towards completion of several textbooks in numerous languages, which founders hope will be followed by mainstream adoption and use of texts developed and housed there.

Textbooks Only or More Than Textbooks

Starting in November 2005, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the Staff Lounge that some content was unacceptable on Wikibooks and had to be removed. Due to implied inaction, some of this content was subsequently deleted by Mr. Wales, and then restored in a minor bout of wheel warring. It should be of note that all of the content that was criticized as inappropriate was subsequently brought up for discussion at the Wikibooks deletion page and the community agreed ultimately with Mr. Wales.

At the same time as these books were deleted, some minor changes with significant implications to a major project policy resulted in some considerable discussion about the mission and future of Wikibooks as a project.

For a long while, it was a general practice of Wikipedia editors to move specific video game-related content into Wikibooks. However, in March 2006, founder Jimmy Wales wrote that he knew of no college that used a video game textbook, and subsequently all video game Wikibooks were removed. They were rehosted on StrategyWiki.

Criticisms

Wikibooks has many incomplete texts, and many argue that even the comprehensive texts (books rated at the highest level) are of poor quality. The wiki model encourages the creation of abortive book projects that linger indefinitely without being improved or deleted, and it can be extremely hard for a visitor of the Wikibooks site to find any high-quality, completed books. The HTML format of the compiled Wikibooks is not suitable for the traditional printing of books with fixed page-width and page-length, and the Wiki syntax is considered ill-suited for professional book editing. Wikibooks also inherits all the criticisms levelled towards wiki-style editing in general.

Project Incubation

There are two major subprojects within Wikibooks, using this project as an incubator for future Wikimedia projects:

Wikijunior is a youth print and online content project.

Wikiversity is a free, open learning environment and research community.

These projects have been Grandfathered as sub-projects even though all future incubators type projects should be now started according to the New project policy of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the proposal added to meta:Proposals for new projects. This is also official Wikibooks policy that new projects of this nature should not be started on Wikibooks. New project ideas like this, unfortunately, do get started often enough on Wikibooks and are frequently targets for deletion discussions.

Both of these projects have been proposed as full Wikimedia sister projects in several aspects, and the respective internet domain names (http://wikijunior.org/ and http://wikiversity.org/) have been registered by the Wikimedia Foundation in anticipation of their becoming sister projects. Their current status as sister projects is the subject of several heated discussions among participants and other Wikimedia users.

References

  • "All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books". Ben Crowell. Retrieved June 18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

Other languages

See also

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