I will try to address several points brought up by Nikola Smolenski. Regarding the lack of interlinking between books at Wikibooks, you have to understand that each book is usually designed to stand alone, without having to link to other books or even Wikipedia. While some might wonder why anyone would want to use PediaPress to print articles/create books for Wikipedia, at Wikibooks of course people would want to create books. There's a big difference between Wikipedia "books"[1] and Wikibooks books in terms of their design for offline use.
Wikibooks can have information that might be found in an encyclopedia, but they will present the information in a different way. Topics will be covered in comprehensive detail and not just through an overview, with prerequisite information (up to the scope of the book) provided so that the reader will not need to go anywhere else. Why aren't people interested enough in working on Wikibooks? The following could be possible reasons. * People don't like the fact that each book can have its own unique style, making it harder to contribute across the entire wiki. * Contributors to individual books don't usually communicate with contributors to similar books or even with the tiny project-wide community. * The project is not working on one large whole such as an encyclopedia or dictionary, so the community is fragmented and few contribute with any big picture in mind. * Reliance on references is not required to the extent seen at Wikipedia, so maybe some see Wikibooks as unreliable. * As mentioned before, the project doesn't get the same ranking in search results so people feel contributions will be ignored. * Sister links from Wikipedia are relegated to the absolute bottom of articles so people stop reading by that point. * The project is not as mature as Wikipedia, so people feel it's a risk to contribute. See the below quotes. "The vast majority of our users are using Wikipedia and not the other projects, which means even a small improvement to Wikipedia is likely to have more impact than even a large improvement to one of the other projects." -Thomas Dalton [2] "It's absolutely not clear to me (and I don't think anyone) that a focused investment in, say, textbook development is actually going to result in predictable payoff in a transformatively larger number of sustainable content contributors." -Erik Moeller [3] Regarding the making of antifreeze, there would be no problem with it at Wikibooks, but it would likely need to be integrated into a larger textbook. I would suggest adding it to Automobile Repair [4] which is already linked from "auto mechanic" at Wikipedia [5]. If your topic is developed enough, it will garner readers on its own. Wikibooks provides a valuable place for in-depth books on topics. Jimmy Wales was excited about the project in 2005 but noted that it will take 20 years to come to fruition because it is a much bigger project [6]. The time and effort will pay off. I hope to see you there soon and will be happy to assist you in getting started. Aaron Adrignola User:Adrignola [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061533.html [3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061608.html [4] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Automobile_Repair [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_mechanic#External_links [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia.html(19:15) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
