Wikibooks

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Wikibooks
Wikibooks logo
URL http://www.wikibooks.org/
Slogan Think free. Learn free.
Commercial? No
Type of site Books wiki
Registration Optional
Available language(s) multilingual
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Community

Wikibooks, previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks, is a Wikimedia Foundation wiki for the creation of free content textbooks and manuals.

Contents

Started on July 10, 2003, the project hosts 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 Karl Wick, contributor to Wikipedia, for a place to start building free content textbooks such as organic chemistry and physics in order to reduce the costs and other limitations on learning materials.

Growth of the seven largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003 – April 2007
Growth of the seven largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003 – April 2007

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. This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that content on Wikibooks is expected to be significantly changed by participants. Raw source documents such as the original text of Shakespearean plays are hosted on Wikisource instead.

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

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.

The counter arguments to these criticisms are that Wikibooks content is available for almost continuous peer review, and thanks to the wiki-style editing, this project also inherits all of the strengths of Wikipedia. For popular titles and items that gather interest from several participants, the quality of the content tends to improve rapidly. Noted books that have achieved this are all highly technical books[citation needed], especially related to computers and the internet, as well as linguistic books related to (human) language learning.

There are two major subprojects within Wikibooks that have used Wikibooks as an incubator:

Wikijunior has been proposed as a full Wikimedia sister project. Some discussion for its creation as a sister project reached the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, but it was an incomplete proposal[citation needed]. The Internet domain name http://wikijunior.org/ was registered by the Wikimedia Foundation in anticipation of Wikijunior's becoming a sister project later.

Wikiversity became a beta project in 2006, when the English Wikiversity became an independent wiki development environment. Content on English Wikibooks was moved to the Wikiversity project as seeding material. As of August 2006, Wikiversity is now a separate project.

These projects were grandfathered as sub-projects. Since their creation, Wikibooks's policy was changed so that future incubator type projects are started according to the New project policy of the Wikimedia Foundation and the proposal added to Proposals for new projects. This also became the official Wikibooks policy on the subject.

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Projects of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikibooks (Wikijunior) · Wikimedia Commons · Wikinews · Wikipedia · Wikiquote · Wikisource · Wikispecies · Wikiversity · Wiktionary
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks"
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