[Foundation-l] Deletion of Wikibooks content by Jimbo
Ray Saintonge
saintonge at telus.net
Wed Nov 30 09:48:34 UTC 2005
Delirium wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Jokebooks are completely out of place in Wikibooks because they do
>> not serve a
>> valid educational purpose. A textbook on comedy that had example
>> jokes in it
>> would be welcome, however. This type of distinction was decided on
>> when I
>> helped found Wikibooks, so Jimbo is not acting by executive fiat. He
>> is simply
>> trying to put that project back on track.
>
> I may be misremembering, but I don't recall an explicit and narrow
> requirement that Wikibooks be "educational" when it was set up, and
> certainly not "educational" in the narrow sense of "something that a
> university would teach". Of course textbooks were a major sort of
> book that people had in mind, but I don't recall anyone saying that
> *only* textbooks would be permitted (not to mention defining what
> constitutes a "textbook"!).
>
> Instead, I recall a focus mostly centered around *format*---Wikibooks
> was to be a place for book-like things that were of a detail, length,
> or tone (e.g. how-tos or lengthy narrative exposition) unsuitable for
> an encyclopedia article and therefore unsuitable for Wikipedia, but
> still useful as information in some sense. I took as a possibly
> mistaken implicit assumption that the *content* was to be basically
> the same as Wikipedia---anything verifiable and neutral.
This is essentially the way I remember it too. I'm sure that if Mav sees
it differently he should be able to cite something to support his facts.
Ec
More information about the foundation-l
mailing list