216:, tend to work on their own project. Writing a textbook is a much more ambitious endeavour than writing an encyclopedia article for example, so people who are successful in doing so tend to be very driven, but focus their work exclusively on one book or one subject area. Since textbooks are instructional it is not enough to simply present information as you would in Knowledge (XXG) – the writing style and the overall structure must be coherent from an instructional point of view. Readers need to be able to learn from a Wikibook, so structure, organization and tone are very important. From this point of view, it's much more important to know your subject matter thoroughly. Many of our editors are educators of various kinds. Of course, Wikibooks is no more a meritocracy than Knowledge (XXG), but it is much more difficult to write a textbook well if you don't know much about the subject compared to writing an encyclopedia article on a subject you're not familiar with.
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especially in universities. This results in a big influx of new contributors who need to be “herded” in the right directions. The professor often doesn't know any better how things work than the students to, so it falls to the community to help them along. And we've had many projects like this which have been highly successful. One such project was the
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If you're interested in writing a text, first see if there's something you can add to or re-work. Just like there should be one article per topic in
Knowledge (XXG), there should be one text per subject in Wikibooks. Only when scope or audience is significantly different should there be more than one
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ready to help you out. In the past, I've had many emails using an amazing array of adjectives to describe how much more welcoming the
Wikibooks project is to new contributors, and how helpful the community is. This is especially true of class projects. Wikibooks is sometimes used as a teaching tool,
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Recently there have been a number of book donations – authors of books have decided to release their book into the wild and add it to our collection. Getting the book converted to wikitext is often a major hurdle, but it's great to have a book added all in one go. While this increases the number of
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The project started 10 July 2003 after requests from Karl Wick. As we all know, Knowledge (XXG) is not for instructional material. Karl had been working on collating articles on organic chemistry into a format that people could learn from. Of course, there was a VFD, and the book was deleted. That
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The major difficulty that I see for
Wikibooks is getting new contributors. The only thing that will make us successful is more people to maintain the wiki, but more importantly contribute content. Many contributors come and write a single book, then leave. We need people to come and stay. Even if
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If not, then you'll want to start off with a detailed outline of the structure of the book. You want to detail the scope of the book, and the overall picture of what you'll be teaching. Once that's complete, then start filling in content. Many new authors at
Wikibooks make what I consider to be a
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Helping new contributors is actually one of the main tasks at
Wikibooks. The bar is a little higher for beginners because we're writing textbooks not encyclopedia articles, so we try to focus very much on making our processes easy to follow, and the regulars are very available to help out new
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is a great example of this new method. Exploring around in the
Subject: namespace is always a great way to find books you're looking for but can't necessarily find in other ways. Maintaining these pages is as easy as ensuring that new books are properly categorized, which we did in the past
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Again, most administrator tasks are consistent across all wikis. One task which will not be familiar to most
Wikipedians is importing. At Wikibooks, administrators may import pages from other projects with a full edit history (barring technical errors of course). Content is often imported
194:(aka game guides). This was always the intent, but was insufficiently and unequally enforced. The rationale is that textbooks are inherently academic. If you take a course in university, there will never be a walkthrough as required reading, so we don't allow such things at Wikibooks. We
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spawned the
Wikibooks project, which Jimbo has hailed as "the next big thing in education" and is generally regarded as being a much bigger project than Knowledge (XXG). It'll probably take 20 years or more to flourish where Knowledge (XXG) has flourished in a much shorter time.
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There are sometimes irritating situations with this, and I'll focus on
Knowledge (XXG) here, though it's not the only example. Wikipedians will often want to move content to Wikibooks after an AFD, but nobody bothers to check whether it's suitable for
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Contributors are the number one thing
Wikibooks needs to succeed. Wherever I can, I try to talk up Wikibooks, and I know other regulars do too. Beyond that I'm not aware of any organized large-scale efforts to get new authors to come to Wikibooks.
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We try to keep the bar to entry as low as possible. Most people will find that Wikibooks is a much more laid-back environment for contributing than Knowledge (XXG). We're a very tight-knit group of contributors, and we tend to work very well
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mistake: they dive right in with contributing content with no clear idea of what the text should look like in the future. “Scope creep” is common, and can be easily avoided by planning what you want to do ahead of time.
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on Wikibooks, which are certainly helpful. We need more press to gain the scale Knowledge (XXG) has. This is something that Wikibooks should be dealing with as a community, and I don't think we've done enough in the
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video games. If you're taking video game design, then of course you'll need that sort of textbook. The line is sometimes hard to draw, but the distinction is between a walkthrough and an academic examination.
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you're not going to contribute another entire textbook, there is always editing to be done. Slow, steady and long-term work in a variety of areas is preferable to contributing only one book and leaving.
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For any Wikipedians involved in a WikiProject, you may well be interested in coming over to see whether we have texts that you can contribute to, or if there's a gap in coverage you can help to fill.
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namespace for these catalogue pages. We also catalogue books by various other methods (Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress & Alphabetical), but these methods are becoming less and less important.
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Wikibooks has all the same maintenance tasks as Knowledge (XXG) does, but let's focus on the differences. As you can imagine, cataloguing our books is a major challenge. Until recently we used
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Another ongoing set of issues is technical. MediaWiki was written for Knowledge (XXG), so it's unsurprising that the software isn't ideal for writing textbooks. We have many
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for our project. The discussion about our new logo isn't restricted to Wikibookians – anyone can come help improve the options and help us decide what to pick.
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project is for kids' books, in an effort to write age-appropriate non-fiction books for kids up to age 12. The second project is our cookbook.
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books we host, it doesn't usually add more contributors. Content is great, but without the people to back it up, that's all it is.
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is an effort to collaboratively write open-content textbooks. There's often some confusion due to the name, but Wikibooks is for
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Wikibooks has Featured Books just like you find Featured Articles at Knowledge (XXG). We've divided the books by subject on
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a place to dump unwanted pages. It's not hard to determine what's acceptable – we're a very friendly folk, so just ask :)
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to keep track of our books. Needless to say, this method isn't scalable, so we've now harnessed an extension called
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In terms of history of Wikibooks, there have been a few major changes over the project's lifespan. Wikiversity (
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resulted in Wikiversity being split off. Wikibooks is still home to two major subprojects. The
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If I want to become an active editor, what should be my first step (other than signing up)?
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contributors. If you can't figure something out, there's a very active helpful
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To do this, we need to become more recognizable. One way is by choosing a new
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which allows us to dynamically list items in a category. We've created a new
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Does the project have any plans to promote itself or recruit more members?
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text on a subject. If there is a pre-existing book, then get crackin!
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which is a recurring class project out of Old Dominion University.
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thoroughly before being marked as featured. We're excited to get
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Another major development was the formalization of the
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Get the latest headlines on your user page – just add
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Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education
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619:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
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243:What are some of the tasks done by administrators?
390:How can I recognize the best works of Wikibooks?
341:What are some difficulties that Wikibooks faced?
207:What activities are performed most at Wikibooks?
399:, and there's a corresponding subject page at
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381:seems to be coming along shortly; same for
630:No comments yet. Yours could be the first!
705:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2008-05
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18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
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403:. These books must meet certain
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415:enabled to assist this process.
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192:exclusion of strategy guides
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198:however allow textbooks
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401:Subject:Featured books
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650:Signpost-subscription
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612:To follow comments,
582:Features and admins
557:Wikibooks interview
474:Features and admins
449:Wikibooks interview
235:Subject:Engineering
31:Wikibooks interview
607:Discuss this story
592:Arbitration report
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484:Arbitration report
320:has given several
144:What is Wikibooks?
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623:purging the cache
587:Technology report
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227:Dynamic Page List
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534:19 May 2008
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