[Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?

[Erik Moeller]

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 at mikepeel.net>:
> 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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-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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