As you all know, Wikibooks was originally intended for textbooks and
other instructional material. But why do many users (meta and
wikipedians in particular) think that Wikibooks is a dumping ground
for all their book-length stuff even if it is non-instructional in
nature (which would be grounds for deletion on [[WB:WIN]])?
It's an interesting discussion on Wikibooks right now about how
Wikibookians see ourselves vs how others see Wikibooks, all having
started from the controversial deletion of a book, itself forked from
Wikipedia over an edit war, which also raised the question on whether
Wikibooks should allow limited forms of Wikipedia forking as a book
foundation (currently this is not allowed due to [[WB:WIN]] - WB is
not an in-depth encyclopedia on any subject).
It also ties in to the question of how effective Wikibooks is in
enforcing its policies: WB has about 9000 users (as listed by the
special page), but only 25 are admins (and among the 25, 2 are
bureaucrats). Even if 1000 users are active on WB (a very
conservative estimate), that's still too much for 25 users (assuming
they are all active) to handle. Making things noticeably worse is
that policies on WB are either unilaterily implemented or are stuck
in a limbo since few will make a consensus (there are also many
issues on WB that the MediaWiki software cannot address, such as
finding the book that a given module is associated with).
Anyways, I want the Wikimedia community at large to comment on how
they think of Wikibooks and its purpose, and that's why I've posted a
message here.