<WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something > that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of > effort here.
Well, I'd hate to see how things would had ended up if everyone had that attitude with regards to the idea of creating a free encyclopedia. However, I don't disagree that contributing to a book is a much larger endeavor than contributing to an article. While this is eased due to the greater freedom authors have in styling and structuring their books, it still takes patience and dedication to finish one. This is evident when one looks at the progress toward completion of the books at Wikibooks, based on each book's individual scope. To help readers find the ones that were more completed, I went through all 2,300+ books currently started and rated them on a percentage basis of completion based on stated scope and red links for pages created in the main contents. 130 are complete, 105 are at 75%, 236 are at 50%, 701 are at 25%, and 1,167 are stubs or single-page "books". So the books at Wikibooks are largely abandoned and unfinished; their primary authors gave up. <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the > world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that. Others don't see it either. The CK-12 Foundation has created quite a few textbooks using the "FlexBooks" platform. I acquired PDFs of many of them for importing into Wikibooks prior to the decision that giving content away for free under a license that allowed commercial reproduction wasn't acceptable and went to CC-BY-SA-NC just like WikiHow. <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but > Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually > accomplish. One of English Wikibooks' featured books, "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education" [1], was created by many students at Old Dominion University with each one working on a specific topic. It's a fine example of how a collaboration of individuals working toward a common goal can get something accomplished. <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > But just the name Wikibooks doesn't sound to me like How To, it sounds like > 150 to 1000 pages on an overarching topic of some kind. And that is frankly what Wikibooks is. I know of one editor whose contributions to the Na'vi language article on Wikipedia were cut down heavily as being too much for an article. He went on to create a whole book on the topic [2] at Wikibooks. There have been many programming books started as a result of source code examples being removed from Wikipedia. And a 1000 page book would not be surprising to me. "Chess Opening Theory" already has 965 and it's not yet done [3]. <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > So on Wikibooks for example, I could create my own How-To Home Repair, and > collect *chapters* contributed by a dozen people into a *book*. It's important to not confuse Wikibooks with Wikipedia Books [4]. Unfortunately the name Wikipedia chose for collections of articles has already begun to lead to confusion [5]. Books at Wikibooks are absolutely not collections of standalone articles when done correctly, with knowledge and concepts built upon as a reader goes through the book. But this unique branding may be diluted due to the naming and placement of Wikipedia Books above Wikibooks books on articles. It does rule out a past proposal to rename Wikibooks to Wikipedia Books, though... <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > What is Wikibooks at all? > The scope, content, purpose were really poorly defined. This is intentional. Initially Wikibooks hosted strategy guides, but then they were deemed to be out of scope and removed. Organic development is encouraged. This can be seen in the definition of what Wikibooks is [6], where more space is spent on what it *isn't*, as an exhaustive list of the former would be incredibly large. With no projects created post-Wikiversity, some have even pushed to turn Wikibooks into an incubator [7]. <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote: > But heck, if I'm going to go to that much trouble, why not just throw it up > on my own web site? You could, but that wouldn't provide what Wikibooks helps to provide, "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge", without having to pay for web hosting or be restricted by a platform that doesn't allow anyone else to edit. - Adrignola [1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education [2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Na%27vi [3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chess_Opening_Theory [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books [5] http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?oldid=2059824#Disappearance_of_Private_WikiBook [6] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks [7] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Incubator _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l