Wikibooks

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Wikibooks is a wiki web site where volunteers collaborate to author free textbooks for the GFDL corpus. The server runs MediaWiki. Wikibooks (formerly "Wikimedia Free Textbook Project" or "Wikimedia-Textbooks"), is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and thus a sister project to Wikipedia.

Wikibooks consists of book modules; each module belongs to a book, often called a "Wikibook". The system of Wikibooks bookshelves lists books into roughly-defined categories.

The English-language edition is at http://en.wikibooks.org while the multilingual portal is http://www.wikibooks.org. Anyone, including you, can edit any textbook module by clicking on the "edit this page" link that appears in every Wikibooks module.

Contents

Organisation

Just as a "bookshelf" is furniture for storing books, a Wikibooks bookshelf is a place for storing links to books being developed on the project.

Founding

Wikipedia's Karl Wick for a place to start building open content textbooks in topics such as organic chemistry and physics. The goal? Bring education to humanity and reduce the costs and other limitations to top-quality learning materials. It was started on July 10, 2003. By 31 July, 2003, there were 123 modules and 47 registered users. As of 7 January, 2006, the English-language Wikibooks had 13,315 modules and 17,006 registered users. However, less than 25 users participate regularily at the community level.

Some of the first books were completely original and others began as text copied over from other sources of GNU FDL textbooks found on the Internet. All of the content is under GNU Free Documentation License. Contributors retain the copyright of their contributions, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible. See copyrights for more information.

Controversies have included the scope of the project (just textbooks or all kinds of books) as well as how best to deal with licensing of the site content, as well as the name and future URL for the project.

Split into multilingual projects

The project, originally http://textbook.wikipedia.org (broken link) became http://www.wikibooks.org. Then someone decided to start separate wikis for each language. The old multilingual wiki became http://en.wikibooks.org, the English-language edition.

A process called transwiki moved non-English modules from en.wikibooks to the other projects, but many non-English modules remained on en.wikibooks until about March 2006.

Community

In one model, there exist three main types of editors or "Wikibookians" at Wikibooks:

  1. Users who move content that was unwanted at Wikipedia.
  2. Users who edit only one or a few books; these users tend to be the main authors of content.
  3. Users who cleanup many books and participate frequently in community discussions; these users tend to be MediaWiki sysops.

The model is not discrete, and there are users who move between the three groups. The tendency is for users to start in group 1 and group 2, then users who edit often will move to group 3.

The existence of group 1 is unfortunate. Wikipedia attracts many authors who write content beyond the scope of an encyclopedia with Wikipedia's many policies. Such content must often be moved to other wikis. However, though there are many wikis on the Internet, few have the honor of being Wikimedia sister projects. Thus, Wikibooks is the preferred destination for much of Wikipedia's unwanted content. Such content often sits unmaintained. It let one Wikipedian to state, "Wikibooks is the graveyard of Wikipedia."

The Wikibook about the computer game Doom, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Doom, provides an example of a Wikibook containing mostly unwanted Wikipedia content.

For some reason, most Wikibookians who start new books will register a user account. Anonymous not-logged-in users, identified by their IP addresses, tend to edit existing pages.

Policies

Wikibooks requires a neutral point of view.

Wikibooks is for texts authored by wiki users; another Wikimedia project, Wikisource, is a wiki that contains previously-published source texts such as old public domain texts.

Controversies

This section documents controversies in the English-language edition of Wikibooks.

The word "textbook"

There is no consensus on the use of the word "textbook". Different users give different idiomatic meanings to the word, which most basically refers to a book of text. At least one user has attempted to make equivalent the word "textbook" and the Wikibooks policy, effectively stating that anything disallowed by Wikibooks policy is not a "textbook". At least one other user argued that the Wikibooks policy disallows several actual types of "textbook".

Non-English Wikibooks do not use this word, for example French-language Wikibooks refers to "textes p�dagogiques".

CheckUser controversy

In January 2006, two users entered community elections for CheckUser status. Despite broad support in the elections, the Wikimedia Foundation prevented the two users from obtaining the status, because less than 25 users voted in favor of them; there are less than 25 active users to participate in such community votes. The Foundation instead is considering an adjustment to its CheckUser Policy that would force projects like English-language Wikibooks to borrow users with CheckUser from another Wikimedia Foundation project that already has them, preferably a project of the same language. However, among the English-language projects, only Wikipedia already has such users. Further, unlike most projects, Wikipedia delegates the selection of users for CheckUser to its arbitration committee instead of subjecting them to popular votes.

Relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikibooks suffers from a lack of contact with its host, the Wikimedia Foundation.

In February 2006, the English-language Wikibooks removed a book called "Wikimania05" to its present location on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, because the book was a collection of papers and presentations from the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikimania conference, and thus outside the scope of the Wikibooks project. The move took place over two months with prominent notices on the front page of the book. Only after the final removal on February 2006 did users start to complain. The book entered the "Votes for undeletion" process. The situation was finally defused with the addition of redirects on Wikibooks pointing to the new location on Meta-Wiki.

The President of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales, who edits Wikibooks as Jimbo Wales, in April 2006 requested the removal from Wikibooks of books about computer and video games. Some users respected this as if it was an official decision, while other users denied such. The incident was a rare occasion of involvement by the President on a project, English Wikibooks, which normally operates consensus and WikiDemocracy. There is a divide between English Wikibooks editors who are familiar with "Jimbo" through other means, and those who do not know him well.

External Links

References

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