First, we think it's wonderful that O'Reilly has done this; TMM is a
fantastic book and a great introduction for newbies. (We have been
giving copies away as gifts for a while.) I believe Frank is planning
to blog about this in more detail soon. Please do show them some love
for doing this; it's obviously highly unusual and very nice. :-)
O'Reilly took the initiative to release the book under a free license,
and we've encouraged it - but we don't have any formal agreement with
them that it ought to be posted on Wikipedia. That's a community
decision, and neither we nor O'Reilly would want it to be any other
way. My personal take is that it should live where it's most likely to
be used and maintained, and regardless of its dead tree origins, the
help section of en.wp seems to be a pretty logical place. But that's
just my take - in future, we are also considering to set up a
dedicated portal with various learning resources for wiki newbies,
where static copies could live.
Erik
2009/1/28 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>et>:
Hi all,
The author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton, has just
uploaded the book to Wikipedia under the GFDL, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual
My reaction when I spotted this was: great, but shouldn't this be on
Wikibooks? Part of the author's response to this was that "the
agreement between O'Reilly Media and the Wikimedia Foundation was
that this would be at /Wikipedia/ ... [do] not remove it from this
site without a /lot/ more discussion among a /lot/ of other people."
Did the WMF really make an agreement saying that the content should
be on Wikipedia, rather than a WMF project or simply under a free
license?
Does anyone want to weigh in with comments on this on the talk page?
Thanks,
Mike Peel
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